Book overview
Why do the same religious traditions produce both Gandhi and the Crusades? Both Desmond Tutu and apartheid theology? Both the Open Letter against ISIS and ISIS itself? Religion and Violence is a graduate-level textbook that refuses the two easy answers - that religion is uniquely violent, or that "real" religion is always peaceful - and asks the harder question instead: through what specific mechanisms do religious beliefs, institutions, and hermeneutical practices contribute to particular forms of violence, and what equally specific resources do those same traditions provide for resistance, peacemaking, and healing?
Drawing on Scott Appleby's thesis of the ambivalence of the sacred, Dr. Rodgir Cohen develops a rigorous comparative framework across sixteen chapters organized in three analytical movements. The first movement (Chapters 1-8) builds the theoretical toolkit: foundational definitions of religion and violence; the classical frameworks of Durkheim, Weber, Girard, Freud, Otto, Eliade, Juergensmeyer, and Appleby; a hermeneutical analysis of how communities weaponize sacred texts; the warrior-God traditions of the Hebrew Bible and Quran in juxtaposition with the peace passages of the New Testament; a full typology of pacifism with extended treatments of Gandhi, King, Day, Nhat Hanh, Tutu, J
