Last week, Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs hosted a panel discussion: Can Interreligious Engagement Be a Realistic Tool for Diplomacy and Peacemaking? The discussion centered around a dossier on Religion and Peacebuilding in Contemporary Global Crises published by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. The dossier was released after the Rome Summer Seminars on Religion and Global Politics convened this summer, designed as a multi-level colloquium built on existing partnerships between the University of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway (RGG), Keough School of Global Affairs and its Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion; the Pontifical Gregorian University (PUG); the Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI); the Sinderesi Foundation; the Adyan Foundation of Lebanon; the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies of Jordan; the Hanns Seidel Stiftung and John Cabot University (JCU).
The dossier includes nine commentaries that each take a look at religion and peacebuilding from an interrelated and yet unique lens. The contribution of Scott Appleby, Dean of the The Keough School of Global Affairs, is titled “Engaging Religions for the Common Good: Pope Francis’ Radical Peacebuilding Proposition.” In it, he discusses the promise of recognizing religion as a legitimate force in global politics while cautioning against its instrumentalization.
The dossier also includes a commentary by Professor Gerard F. Powers, an Ansari Institute faculty fellow and director of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network at the Kroc Institute. Powers addresses the “capacity gap” in the Catholic Church’s contribution to global peacemaking with concrete recommendations on how those gaps might be closed.
Read about the Rome Summer Seminars here
Check out the dossier here