Christianity and its historical challenges
Today, religions are often accused of being factors of violence. Monotheisms are especially considered as generators of violence, much more than polytheisms and non-religious ideologies. The first CIHEC panel, ”Religious tolerance and religious violence” looks at points of conflict and also aspects of tolerance in five different contexts: The Puritan New England, the Bosnian War in the 1990s, 19th century Portugal, Czechoslovakia in 1938–1941 and Estonia in the 1920s.
The second panel “Religion and Totalitarianism” looks at churches’ role and Christians’ activity in different totalitarian contexts: The Civil War Spain, Nazi Germany, the Prague Spring, and the Communist Poland.
The third panel “ Women and Theology” starts from the observation that the function of doctrinal teaching, in Christianity, is traditionally reserved for men, by virtue of the word of Paul: "I do not allow the woman to teach nor to dominate the man" (1 Timothy 2, 12) , adding to a more general instruction: “that women be silent in assemblies: they are not allowed to speak; they must remain submissive, as the law also says ”(1 Corinthians 14:34). However, breaches immediately appeared in this ban.
The panel looks at cases of women making theology in the medieval Europe, in Italy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the Nazi Germany, in the apartheid South Africa, and in Cameroon.