Late Tuesday afternoon I entered 10 Lenox Street, an old tudor nestled in the wooded suburb just south of the MassPike. In the foyer there was a table offering cheeses, vegetables, and many bottles of wine. I found a seat in the next room over; it was oak-paneled and a large black table sat in the center. The room was hot and poorly ventilated; the academics who filled the room were just as stuffy. I had shown up for the second lecture of the BU Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs’ Seminar on Religion, Pluralism and Civil Enculturation and was already starting to feel slightly out of place. Seated on the periphery of the room were graduate and PhD students studying political science, international relations, religion, anthropology, and sociology (I was one of maybe five undergrads in attendence). The large black table was reserved for professors and the guest speaker, Dr. Scott Appleby, Director of the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Appleby’s talk, titled “Building Peace Among Contending Modernities” (he decided to change it once he started his lecture), concerned the ongoing struggle of restoring peace to societies tattered by violence. The talk also addressed the question “How are conflict settings contested by conflicting modernities?” and the effects of religious and ethnic conflict upon the “ordinary religious person.” Using his first-hand knowledge of Mindanao, the easternmost island in the Philippines (and what he described as the “wild west” of the nation), as a case study, Dr. Appleby described the island as in perpetual conflict between warring political movements and religious violence. He also discussed his opinons and experiences in “peace building”: highlighting the inefficiencies he saw in state-coordinated, U.N.-run liberalist peace building, Dr. Appleby advocated the grassroots, culturally-specific peace building he practiced over his career, which aimed to justly establish peace.
I found certain aspects of his lecture amazing. At one point Dr. Appleby talked about his struggles in trying to discontinue religious violence. He told how Catholic Mindanao pastors would keep guns on the pulpit during their sermons after strings of kidnappings or murders. When Dr. Appleby attempted to convince Mindanao bishops to accept Catholic teachings of Christian non-violence they reproached him with, “Is the Church telling us we can’t defend ourselves?” When members of the Mindanao clergy refused calls to relinquish violence, their embittered conflict only appeared more unsolvable. Because ethnic and religious conflicts span generations, the likelihood of peaceful resolution seems even smaller.
It was then that I finally realized why all these stuffy academics were crowded into a stuffy room in a stuffy old house, instead of passing time outdoors and enjoying a respite from the terrible, rainy weather we’ve been having lately. Everything that was being discussed wasn’t just intellectual masturbation (which I’ve come to find is a favorite hobby of the liberal arts departments around here). These were real problems, hurting real people, and they needed to be solved. Dr. Appleby said that “48% of peace accords since the end of the Cold War result in a relapse of violence within 3 – 5 years.” The importance of developing better ways to facilitate peace between warring ethnicities and religions, the focus of Dr. Appleby’s entire life, is paramount for the future of any humanitarian aid or development. These weren’t just empty words being thrown across a large black table between academics; these were ideas with the promise of greater change.
