War and Peace in Religious Culture

For thousands of years, continuing into our contemporary world, concerns about war and peace have been of great significance for most religions and religious cultures, whose essentialized and applied contextualized formulations have often been diverse and contradictory. These have involved internal and external disputes, divisions, and major changes regarding doctrine, institutional structure, rituals, and ways of living. Scholarly articles in this Reprint focus on how religious cultures have interpreted the nature of war—rejecting it outright, promoting it, and/or accepting some forms of it, as in religious just war theory—and their related approaches to war and peace. Articles in this volume focus on how religious cultures have interpreted peace, related inner peace and outer peace, and approached the idea of peace as the transcendence of the world of conflict and war, separating it from and/or relating it to peace as action-oriented worldly (self-)transformation—as in religious views that there is no peace without justice. Scholars in this Reprint, in their approaches to issues of war and peace, focus on clarifying what is meant by religious culture and whether there is such a clear concept as religious culture that can be distinguished from nonreligious culture, or whether there are only many contextualized religious cultures. In doing so, the articles emphasize a specific religious culture, several comparative religious cultures, and/or universal features of religious culture as related to war and peace. This Reprint is of the greatest significance for understanding contemporary crises and the future of humankind.