PARTICIPANTS

R. Scott Appleby
Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame

Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago,1985) examines the roots of religious violence and the potential of religious peacebuilding. He teaches courses in American religious history and comparative religious movements. From 1988 to 1993 Appleby was co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an international public policy study conducted by the American Academy of arts and Sciences. From 1985 to 1987 he chaired the religious studies department of St. Xavier College, Chicago. Appleby is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Rowman & Littlefield 2000), and editor of Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East (University of Chicago 1997). With Martin E. Marty, he co-edited the five-volume Fundamentalism Project (University of Chicago Press). Appleby is also the author of Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame 1992), co-editor of Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (Indiana 1995) and co-author of Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious (Crossroad, 1989). He has been a fellow of the Institute since 1996, and director since 2000.

Paragraph Statement

Question: What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?

I will interpret the question posed as if religions are or could become allies, collaborators and even recruits for international NGOs. Thus the question becomes: what stands in the way of effective collaboration or partnership between religious communities (or individuals) and international NGOs? The answer is: a lack of expertise by both parties in the ability to negotiate, translate, incorporate, honor specific religious values, practices and beliefs. The battle of competing or contrasting "frames" continues in some settings to inhibit the mutual understanding and insight into the other which is necessary for genuine collaboration. Unlocking religious potential for conflict resolution, humanitarian intervention, cooperation in relief and development and other NGO services depends on cultivating an encompassing idiom, bridging language or a set of integrative practices that is sufficiently multivalent (accessible to religious, inter-religious and secular meanings) and yet resonant with the depth dimensions of a particular tradition.  How can religions internalize and enact the priorities and methods of the NGOs? How can NGOs draw on the local knowledge, cultural resources and ethical wisdom of the religion(s)? Not an obvious or easy task.

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