The Ambivalence of the Sacred By R. Scott Appleby. (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. 429 pages.)

Abstract

The Ambivalence of the Sacred book attempts to articulate a framework for
formulating specific answers, on a case-by-case basis, to three overarching
questions pertaining to the seemingly ambivalent relationship between
religion and violence. First, it seeks to examine conditions under which
religious actors become violent; secondly, the opposite circumstances
under which religious actors reject the violence of religious extremists
according to the same principles of religious sanctity; and thirdly, the
settings in view of which non-violent religious actors can become agents of
peacebuilding. The purported goal is to identify and develop means and
methods by which religion may become an instrument of conflict management
and/or resolution instead of being a source of deadly conflicts.
Appleby argues that religion can be administered in such a prudent,
selective, and deliberate fashion so as to allow it consistently to contribute
to a peaceful resolution of conflicts. Additionally, that a new form
of conflict transformation --"religious peacebuilding'- is actually taking
shape among local communities plagued with violence. In this sense
"ambivalence of the sacred projects an awareness that both possibilities
of life and death reside within the holy.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part (chs. 1-5) attempts to
elaborate elements of a theory of religion's role in deadly conflict and to
address the first two overarching questions above. Citing the cases of South
Africa and the transformations in Roman Catholic teachings, in response to
both state apartheid violence in the former, and to post-war era pressures
for pluralism on the latter, chapter 1 examines the paradoxical and ambivalent
logic of the sacred. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the conditions under
which religious actors legitimate violence as a sacred duty or privilege in
light of the violent forces of ethno-nationalism and religious extremism.
Chapter 4 examines the phenomenon of nonviolent religious militancy by
looking at Buddhist peacemaking in Southeast Asia and by introducing
transnational NGO's that work with and among local religious actors. The ...