The 12^th Sarajevo UN World Interfaith Harmony Week

February 5–12, 2024

International Forum Bosnia, Sarajevo

 

International Forum Bosnia will be holding a programme of events to mark the 12^th Sarajevo UN World Interfaith Harmony Week this year in response to the appeal by the UN General Assembly session held on October 20, 2010, to member-states. While International Forum Bosnia will, as usual, be organising and coordinating the activities, a number of other national and international organisations and societies will also be participating and contributing.

The key themes of this year's programme are summed up in the title:

Global Ethics: Urgent Questions and Challenges.

The programme will take place on Wednesday the 5^th of February and Thursday the 12^th of February. There will be three academic panels. The panels will take the form of hybrid meetings, with some participants present in person and others through Zoom. Participants will be from public and academic life in Bosnia, other universities around the world, and the Bosnian diaspora. The panels will be on the following topics:

 

Ø  First Panel on Global Ethics and the Crooked Timber of Humanity: Jewish, Christian, and Muslims Views on Urgent Questions and Challenges

The project to conceive of and institute a Global Ethics lies at the heart of all the monotheisms and the universal or world religions. More specifically, the globalisation of the ethical out of our necessarily individual encounter with and responsibility before a personal but transcendent God is the common core of the Abrahamic traditions. His Oneness is the guarantor of our uniqueness. It is reflected in the shared complex of sacrificial individualism on which all three of these traditions and communities are built. Nothing is more urgent at the present juncture of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian relations than the challenge of recovering and developing this ethical common ground in the construction of plural post-secular orders and societies that can balance the demands of identity with those of difference, as we emerge towards global forms of interaction and find ways to respect and manage the conflict of rights and claims that is inherent to coexistence within a world that can never be anything but shared.

 

Ø  Second Panel on Lady Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ: A Symbol of Maternal Mercy and the Striving for Peace or Something Else?

The Lady Mary is both a shared and a discrete symbol – connecting and dividing the traditions and their adherents. Born into the Jewish tradition and a major presence in the Muslim, she is nonetheless principally identified with the Christian traditions, within which she has been represented and interpreted as both fundamental and foreign to its core. She has been variously interpreted as an inheritance of paganism and an expression of the primordial feminine divine. At the same time, she is seen as offering a compensatory mechanism that both preserves and contests the paternalistic nature of Abrahamic monotheism, as both a symbolisation of oppressive heteronormativity and phallogocentrism and one of resistance to phallicism by the encompassing feminine. Finally, she has been seen as a symbol that allows us to transcend the binary and opens up pathways of identification that transgress reductive identity. It is particularly striking under conditions of modernity and post-modernity that Mary and Marian apparitions, shrines, and pilgrimages have become major mechanisms for mediating access to the divine and of hierophany. Mary has become a powerful symbol of peace and the striving for peace, but, like any powerful religious symbol, her cloak has always also been deployed ideological cover to projects that promote peace by the redirection of violence and the reinforcement of boundaries.

 

Ø  Third Panel on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Hans Küng's Project of a Global Ethic

The question of a global ethic or Weltethos is particularly associated Hans Küng, one of the leading Catholic theologians of the second half of the 20th century, whose relationship with the Catholic hierarchy and magisterium was, to say the least, complex. His comprehensive project to restructure Christianity's self-understanding involved major attempts to reconceptualise the sister religions of Judaism and Islam as well, efforts ultimately integrated into his project for a Global Ethic or the establishment of a common substrate and content to the world religions and the distillation of a shared set of values to underpin global justice and politics, global business practice, and global culture. For some, this is the only pathway to building a shared world space within which difference can flourish and justice be provided a forum. To others, it can seem like the appropriation of projected commonalities in the service of reification, the imposition of imagined traditions, and the reduction of fundamentally other histories and cultures within a post-Christian frame – not unlike Habermas' post-secularism.

 

All three panels will include a number of invited speakers who will talk for approximately 15 minutes each. The sessions will be open to the public/members of International Forum Bosnia.