Prof. Wesley Wildman Featured in BU Today for Simulating Religious Violence movie and project
The following is an excerpt from BU Today’s article “A BU Filmmaker Captures a BU Researcher’s Quest against Religious Violence” by Rich Barlow, featuring Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics Wesley Wildman, published on November 18, 2024.
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Wildman coauthored a book in June, Modeling Religion (Bloomsbury), about his and colleagues’ use of computers to study faith’s role in seismic cultural shifts dating all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution.
“The sorts of things we discover from the computational simulation,” he says, “are the conditions under which extremism can lead to violence—where the tipping points are.” The size of opposing factions in a conflict is one clue: “when it’s close to 50-50, you have a much higher risk of religious extremism tipping over into violence.”
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