Jean-Pierre Warnier, reporting from Paris,
offers some reflections on Charlie Hebdo and the burgeoning Je Suis Charlie
movement. David Morgan builds on Warnier’s comments by considering the
humble pencil as means and motive of the events in Paris. What both bring to
the forefront is the role that materiality, and, particularly, material
religion, play in this confrontation with and affirmation of the democratic
process. At issue are many serious issues: the rights and privileges of
divergent groups, and their divergent commitments, in pluralistic societies,
the proper balance of respect and transparency between those of different communities, and the proper response to attenuate the necessary frictions that
will always exist whenever people of different backgrounds choose to live
side-by-side in democratic states. Hopefully, in celebrating Charlie we can
celebrate the freedom of speech, a bedrock institution for flourishing
democracies, without celebrating the sparks that fly when critics choose to
depict the prophet Muhammad, an indecorous act, at the very least, but not
something to be responded to with violence and terror, not in this day and age,
and certainly not in Paris.
