Can Interfaith Dialogue Cure Religious Violence?

[rug]

There are no easy answers here.

April 25, 2013
By Lucia Hulsether

In the wake of the Boston Bombings, Eboo Patel, public intellectual and director of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), has proposed, in a recent article on HuffPo, that this explosive violence resulted partly from a failure of interfaith dialogue.

With the caveat that “interfaith programs are not a miracle solution,” he offers three ways that this work can help:

First, “interfaith helps harmonize people’s identities.” Patel goes on:

“In America, just about everyone is some sort of hyphenated hybrid of race, religion and ethnicity/nationality... Religious extremists try to separate people’s various identities and pit them against each other.”

Patel suggests that the Tsarnaev brothers might have been less vulnerable to extremism if they “had been involved in discussions with people from other backgrounds about how their faith identity was mutually enriching with their nationality and citizenship.”

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/7076/can_interfaith_dialogue_cure_religious_violence

[kwassa]

1. I think Tamarlan's alienation from life in the US fed his religiousity.

He was seeking a meaningful identity, and chose to do that with a form of Islam that allowed him to blame America for his problems.

Dzhokhar actually fit in this country with many different kinds of people quite comfortably, but he was under his brother's influence. Many cities are multicultural now; it is more the norm than the exception. Tamarlan would not have been available for such dialogue.

[pinto]

2. Could help, imo. Not cure, but surely help the situations.

[okasha]

3. The two most important things

interfaith dialogue can do are prevent mutual demonization and strengthen faith communities against those who would manipulate them for political and economic purposes.

[goldent]

4. Suggestions like this are good and can't hurt

but I believe people who would plant bombs in crowds have unique mental problems, and probably wouldn't respond to cures that seem reasonable to us.