30/06/2026 16:30 - 17:30

HALL: Parenzo - A12

Contact: Chase C.

Chair: Chase C.

The powerful often appropriate categories like "sacred" and "divine warrant" to justify acts of coercion, abuse, and appropriation, under the auspices of order, stability, and superiority. In due course, activists, victims, and good people of conscience have employed the same categories to disrupt such totalizing enterprises and escape oppressive conditions. In the wake of such histories, those who remain are left to wonder at the lingering brokenness and to speculate on how best to heal.
In times past, religious categories of sacrifice, redemption, and reconciliation have been used to frame spiritual and political recourse. In more recent times, the concept of reparations has been introduced into such considerations. Religious categories can be deeply ambiguous; they have been employed to liberate, but also to stall or postpone liberation and a righting of injustice and inequality. Reparations are often seen by victims of injustice and their advocates, as one way to publicly force accountability and atonement, and to symbolically and structurally move forward. Reparations call for dispossession and a rebalancing of the status quo, and thus are often received as a threat by those in power.
This panel focuses on reparations as a way to a more just society based on the common good, and invites would-be presenters to consider three things: (1) the varied ways that reparations have been considered, in different situations and contexts; (2) the possibility that the concept of reparations shares the same ambiguity as other religious categories aimed at healing, and thus may, in a similar inadvertent fashion, perpetrate unintended inequalities; and (3) ways for reparations to be better received by the larger society, and thus become a more effective tool for moving communities towards a just future. We invite paper proposals that engage the question of reparations from interdisciplinary, religious and non-religious, contextual perspectives.