Chapter 1
Ellen Ott Marshall, “Dignity and Conflict: Religious Peacebuilding,” in Value and Vulnerability: An Interfaith Dialogue on Human Dignity
Marshall understands conflict as natural and necessary. Peacebuilding is the work of addressing underlying causes while also creating structures to “deal creatively with inevitable conflict” (468-469).
She begins with two sets of observations:
“(1) dignity functions as a cause for conflict and also a criterion for the means of conflict;
(2) dignity, informed by the Christian doctrine of Imago Dei, grounds individual rights and maintained relationship… religious conflict and peacebuilding calls one to the ongoing work of recognizing and restoring the image of God in the world” (467).
Acknowledging human dignity as inviolable through sustained nonviolence allows one to continue to honor imago Dei and “love they enemy” (474).
But what happens when your nonviolence simply begets more violence? What do you do with all that disillusionment and anger and death?
Marshall writes that violence does moral injury to the one who perpetuates it, and that engaging in violence, too, diminishes the image of God.
I have had this theory for a while—it is nice to know that I’m not alone.
But I still don’t know what to do with it. To enact violence on another human being is to erode one’s moral fiber. And so what? What should the object of violence thus say to its perpetrator?
And what happens when the perpetrator does not see their action as violent at all?