A grant has been awarded to Dr Julia Snyder, Dr Daniel Weiss, and CIP to equip religious and interfaith leaders to address common concerns about religion, scripture, and violence.
A variety of online and print resources are being developed for leaders of religious and interfaith organizations to use in training their own members to grapple with scriptures that seem to condone violence – from their own tradition or other traditions – and to respond to concerns in wider society about these scriptures and the religious traditions that consider them sacred. The resources are designed to allow group leaders easily, confidently, and effectively to facilitate nuanced discussions about these issues.
A £10,000 grant from the Arts and Humanities Impact Fund at the University of Cambridge will support development of these resources, which focus on scriptures from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions.
The project builds on academic research contained in Snyder and Weiss, eds., Scripture and Violence (London: Routledge, 2020), and a series of AHIF-funded impact events organized by Dr Giles Waller and Dr Weiss in 2019.
The project coordinators are currently seeking religious and interfaith organizations to help pilot test materials, at online or in-person workshops. If your church, mosque, synagogue, interfaith group, or student religious society is interested in holding such a workshop, please contact Dr Snyder at jas249@cam.ac.uk.
Resources will be available at www.scriptureandviolence.org beginning later this year.