Religious Representations in and around War

Dear Colleagues,

Emile Durkheim, a sociologist of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, designated a “religion” (which Durkheim actually meant an institutionalized form of religion) as a unified system of beliefs and practices that unite people into a single moral community. These elements of religion, viz., beliefs, practices, and a moral community, have often served as channels for religious people to be involved in works in and around wars. Religions have united and divided people, have encouraged or restricted wars, have given soldiers moral instructions and ways to attain salvation, and have provided practices to commemorate wars and the war dead.

This Special Issue explores various patterns of religion–war relations and provides theoretical perspectives to understand why, how, and in which forms religion and war are connected. Within their own disciplines, authors can examine cases of religion–war relations in any place and in any age (from the ancient to the modern ages) and can extract any pattern from or present any perspective of these relations. “Religion” is not confined to those having established doctrines and church organizations, which is perhaps what people primarily mean by that concept. “Religion” includes any system with a “religious” nature or elements, which may not be socially recognized as a religion, but instead as a custom or tradition, and those that followers call “being spiritual and not religious”. “War” includes any forms of military battle between different groups, such as the Crusades, private wars in tribal societies, international wars, and asymmetric wars (guerrilla warfare and terrorism). We are calling for papers which, as a whole, deal with a broad range of cases, as this Special Issue intends to provide a wider view of the issue of religion–war relations.

The following are examples of paper topics: the historicity of the concepts of “religion” in relation to “war”; peculiarities of wars depicted in religious myths; elements of war represented in images of religious figures; religion’s resistance to battle; religious justification of warfare in a sacred mode; reformation of a group’s religious identity through tension and conflict; religious discourses developed for knights or soldiers, for whom fighting is a role; military chaplains or religious specialists who work for the military; religions and memories of war; religious practices to remember the war dead; and any aspect of the “culture of war.” This Special Issue will be a collaboration by researchers from different disciplines, such as religious studies, history, art history, history of thought, philology, literature, anthropology, and sociology, who have, in general, worked on this issue separately.

Prof. Dr. Tsunehiko Sugiki
Prof. Dr. Akira Nishimura
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• religion
• war