Deliver Us from Evil: Genocide and the Christian World
June 22 - July 10, 2009
Directed by James E. Waller, Ph.D.
Guest Speakers
 
John Roth and Victoria Barnett
Seminar Description
“Deliver Us From Evil: Genocide and the Christian World” will explore the role of the church as a social institution, with institutional actors, and how it shapes a culture in which genocidal violence may occur and how it responds to such a culture both during and after the genocidal violence. Over a three week period, participants will critically examine the role of the Christian churches in 20th century genocide and the subsequent consequences for Christian thought and practice in the contemporary world. Embedded throughout these analyses are questions of the moral responsibilities of the institutional church; the churches’ standing as manipulated or independent actors; how and why churches become linked with power holders in genocidal regimes; how institutional church leaders use rhetorical and theological devices to develop religious justifications for genocidal belief systems; the variability of institutional churches’ responses; the motivations behind churches’ interventionist role in reconciliation after the genocidal violence, etc. Such questions remain keenly relevant for church-state relations in contemporary international affairs – for instance, the ongoing genocide in Darfur; the escalating violence in Zimbabwe (about which church leaders are warning could reach genocidal levels); and the recent move in Russia to coronate the Russian Orthodox Church as the de facto official state religion, reinforcing a nationalistic ideology while promoting state-sponsored religious intolerance.
Seminar and Application Information
About the Director
Dr. James Waller is the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. As a widely-recognized scholar in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, Waller has held international visiting professorships at the Technical University in Berlin (1990) and the Catholic University in Eichstatt, Germany (1992) as well as being an invited participant in international seminars hosted by the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies at the University of Leicester in England (2006); the Institute of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (2007 and 2008); the Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung in Berlin, Germany (2009); and the VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands (2009). Waller also has been awarded summer fellowships, and been a teaching fellow, with the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University (1996, 2007, and 2008) and at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (1999, 2003, and 2005). He is also regularly involved as an instructor for the Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention at the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. These seminars, held in conjunction with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, introduce mid-level government officials from around the world to issues of genocide warning and prevention.
In addition to three books, Waller has published twenty-eight articles in peer-reviewed professional journals and contributed thirteen chapters in edited books. Waller’s book on perpetrators of genocide, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2002), was praised by Publisher’s Weekly for “clearly and effectively synthesizing a wide range of studies to develop an original and persuasive model of the process by which people can become evil.” In addition to being used as a textbook in college and university courses around the world, Becoming Evil also was short-listed for the biennial Raphael Lemkin Award from the International Association of Genocide Scholars and was released in a revised and updated second edition in March 2007. Concepts from Becoming Evil have been the basis for an international best-selling novel (The Exception by Christian Jungersen) and a play currently being workshopped at UCLA. A Hungarian translation of Becoming Evil is scheduled for release in April 2009.
Seminars & Workshops 2009
For further information contact:
Seminars in Christian Scholarship
Calvin College
1855 Knollcrest Circle SE
Grand Rapids MI 49546-4402
616.526.8558
fax 616.526.6682
seminars@calvin.edu
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