The topic of violence and art can be viewed from many perspectives, from the depiction of violence to people who inflict violence on art. Here, the focus is on the ‘violence in our thinking’. Can one's thinking inflict violence on things? Can cold, scientific thinking, thinking in prejudice, or ideological thinking inflict violence on works of art? Here, we address how this happens and how one can confront this violence against works of art. How can it be healed? Through this, the difference between the violence of Thinking and Thinking as a Battle will be explained. At the center of this argument, we discuss the Contemplative Seeing of the World (Welt-Anschauung) which enables an honest seeing. This means becoming friends.

This article examines religious hate speech as a discursive technology that constructs adversaries through conceptual antinomies, enabling moral disengagement and legitimising exclusion or violence. It draws on interdisciplinary perspectives from philosophy, law, sociology, and theology and discusses significant cases—including the Northern Ireland Troubles, ISIS propaganda, Hindu extremist rhetoric against Christians, and Buddhist ultranationalism against Rohingya Muslims—demonstrating how religious identities intersect with other factors to create hostile narratives. The article explores definitional challenges, distinguishes hate speech from incitement to genocide and blasphemy laws, and examines US and European legal approaches. It reveals that hate speech produces multilayered harms affecting individuals, targeted groups, and democratic processes, with causal factors including ideological antinomies, political manipulation, and social media amplification. The study argues that combating religious hate speech requires moving beyond punitive criminal law to embrace restorative justice, interfaith solidarity, counter-speech initiatives, and educational programs. Only through multifaceted collective efforts can societies preserve democratic values and protect vulnerable populations from discrimination and marginalization.

This article examines the role of religion in shaping conflict and peace in contemporary Iran through the lens of gender and Islamic feminist activism. Drawing on a historical genealogy from the Qajar era to the Islamic Republic and to present times, it shows how women’s bodies and legal status have been central to the biopolitical construction of the modern nation and to the contested terrain where emergent gender identities and state violence have intersected. At the same time, the article highlights how Iranian Muslim feminists—scholars, activists, and ordinary women—have articulated internal critiques of patriarchal jurisprudence through renewed interpretations of the Qur’an and Islamic law. These reinterpretations challenged structural violence, promoted legal reform, and generated educational spaces that cultivate critical reasoning and ethical agency grounded in Islamic tradition. Nowadays, rather than offering definitive solutions, Islamic feminism provides culturally situated tools for rethinking conflict, expanding interpretive authority, and fostering everyday practices of nonviolent transformation within the framework of the Islamic Republic.

In this paper, I am concerned with three key questions: 1. Why are the values of humility, compassion, and justice so essential and destabilizing in interfaith dialogues, especially in times of peace? 2. Why should teaching interfaith dialogue always provide space for the grievances on all sides from past, present (and possibly) future unrest and conflict? 3. How do interfaith dialogue participants in post-conflict settings balance the desire and need for justice with compassion and humility for one’s self, one’s community, and the community in conflict? To begin to answer these questions, I will first reflect upon the role, limits, and relationships between these three virtues before turning to the aims and goals of teaching these virtues in the context of interfaith dialogue. At issue is whether the failure to embody compassion and humility through interfaith dialogue in times of relative peace and prosperity signal the impossibility or meaninglessness of such dialogue when passions are rife, stakes are high, and vulnerability, rage, and hopelessness abound.