From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion's connection to violence.For the first time in American history, religious self-identification is on t
From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion's connection to violence.For the first time in American history, religious self-identification is on t
From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion and the history of human violence.For the first time, religious self-identification is on the decline
Most of the 13 essays are reprinted from journals and anthologies between 1981 and 2000. They cover religion and historical crosscurrents in Renaissance drama, sacred violence and the mysteries, and c
This book probes the complex interweaving, across time and cultures, of violence and non-violence from the perspective of the present. One of the first of its kind, it offers a comprehensive examinati
Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behaviour, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that
Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behavior, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that t
In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Richard Holloway retells the entire history of religion—from the dawn of religious bel
In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Richard Holloway retells the entire history of religion - from the dawn of religious b
For three centuries, a mixture of religion, violence, and economic conditions created a fertile matrix in Western Europe that racialized an entire diasporic population who lived in the urban centers of the Latin West: Jews. This Element explores how religion and violence, visited on Jewish bodies and Jewish lives, coalesced to create the first racial state in the history of the West. It is an example of how the methods and conceptual frames of postcolonial and race studies, when applied to the study of religion, can be productive of scholarship that rewrites the foundational history of the past.
This is the first monograph on the fascinating and controversial Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, to make full use of contemporary manuscript and published sources focussing on her role as Huguenot
Warfare is a constant in human history. Contributors to this book contend that agency and culture, inherited values and dispositions (such as religion and other cultural practices), beliefs, and insti
Violence and the Sikhs interrogates conventional typologies of violence and non-violence in Sikhism by rethinking the dominant narrative of Sikhism as a deviation from the ostensibly original pacifist-religious intentions and practices of its founders. This Element highlights competing logics of violence drawn from primary sources of Sikh literature, thereby complicating our understanding of the relationship between spirituality and violence, connecting it to issues of sovereignty and the relationship between Sikhism and the State during the five centuries of its history. By cultivating a non-oppositional understanding of violence and spirituality, this Element provides an innovative method for interpreting events of 'religious violence'. In doing so it provides a novel perspective on familiar themes such as martyrdom, Martial Race theory, warfare and (post)colonial conflicts in the Sikh context.
The lives of hundreds of millions of people have been saved and enriched by their strong religious commitments. And yet a global epidemic of fundamentalism draws many of the furiously religious to v
The lives of hundreds of millions of people have been saved and enriched by their strong religious commitments. And yet a global epidemic of fundamentalism draws many of the furiously religious to v
This book opens the debate about German history in the long term – about how ideas and political forms are traceable across what historians have taken to be the sharp breaks of German history. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the catastrophes at the center of German history. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - nation and nationalism, religion and religious exclusion, racism and violence - that are the center of the German historical experience and that have long histories. Smith explores these deep continuities in novel ways, emphasizing their importance, while arguing that Germany was not on a special path to destruction. The result is a series of innovative reflections on the crystallization of nationalist ideology, on patterns of anti-Semitism, and on how the nineteenth-century vocabulary of race structured the twentieth-century genocidal imagination.
This book opens the debate about German history in the long term – about how ideas and political forms are traceable across what historians have taken to be the sharp breaks of German history. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the catastrophes at the center of German history. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - nation and nationalism, religion and religious exclusion, racism and violence - that are the center of the German historical experience and that have long histories. Smith explores these deep continuities in novel ways, emphasizing their importance, while arguing that Germany was not on a special path to destruction. The result is a series of innovative reflections on the crystallization of nationalist ideology, on patterns of anti-Semitism, and on how the nineteenth-century vocabulary of race structured the twentieth-century genocidal imagination.
From sixteenth-century Geneva to urban developments in Mecca today, The Politics of Iconoclasm explores the history of image-breaking, the culture of violence and its paradoxical roots in the desire f
Volume 1 in the new Cambridge World History of Slavery surveys the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world. Although chapters are devoted to the ancient Near East and the Jews, its principal concern is with the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. These are often considered as the first examples in world history of genuine slave societies because of the widespread prevalence of chattel slavery, which is argued to have been a cultural manifestation of the ubiquitous violence in societies typified by incessant warfare. There was never any sustained opposition to slavery, and the new religion of Christianity probably reinforced rather than challenged its existence. In twenty-two chapters, leading scholars explore the centrality of slavery in ancient Mediterranean life using a wide range of textual and material evidence. Non-specialist readers in particular will find the volume an accessible account of the early history of this crucial phenomenon.
This 1996 book examines the relationship between the theologies of atonement and penal strategies. Christian theology was potent in Western society until the nineteenth century, and the so-called 'satisfaction theory' of atonement interacted and reacted with penal practice. Drawing on the work of Norbert Elias and David Garland, the author argues that atonement theology created a structure of affect which favoured retributive policies. He ranges freely between Old Testament texts, St Anselm, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British social history, to show the integral connection between sin and crime, the legal and the moral. The question arises if the preaching of the cross not only desensitised us to judicial violence but even lent it sanction. The last two chapters review theory and practice in the twentieth century, and Timothy Gorringe makes concrete proposals for both theology and criminal and societal violence.
