Religion Violence

Preston Sprinkle jumps into a compelling, passionate study of God’s perspective on violence. Examining both the seemingly angry, violent God of the Old Testament and the peacemaking Jesus of the New, Preston takes us back to Scripture to discern how God has really called His people to think and live in the midst of a violent world. He asks us to join him in inviting God to challenge our presuppositions, to set aside our biases and backgrounds and fears.

Violence and the Sacred Explained: René Girard on Mimetic Desire, Scapegoats, Ritual, Myth, and the Origins of Religion and Society is a practical guide to Girard’s most influential argument about how desire, conflict, religion, and social order fit together. Girard’s starting point is simple and unsettling: people often learn what to want by copying other people. That borrowed desire can turn neighbors, friends, siblings, lovers, and political groups into rivals. As rivalry spreads, conflict stops being a private dispute and becomes contagious. This book explains that chain clearly, ...

René Girard Explained: Mimetic Desire, Scapegoating, Violence, Religion, and Human Culture introduces a thinker whose central claim is both simple and unsettling: people do not just desire things on their own. They learn what to want by imitating others. From that starting point, Girard built a far-reaching account of rivalry, conflict, blame, religion, and social order. This book explains his ideas in clear language for intelligent non-specialists, with concrete examples drawn from ordinary life, public controversy, and cultural history. The discussion begins with Girard’s life and ...

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 in American. Some analysts have cited as cause a post-9/11perception: that faith in general is...

What do we do with a God who sanctions violence? Old Testament violence proves one of the most troubling topics in the Bible. Too often, the explanations for the brutality in Scripture fail to adequately illustrate why God would sanction such horrors on humanity. These unanswered questions leave readers frustrated and confused, leading some to even walk away from their faith.

Violence in the Old Testament has long been a stumbling block for Christians and skeptics alike. God Is a Man of War offers a fresh interpretation of Old Testament accounts of violence, by exploring them through the twofold lens of Orthodox tradition and historical context. Father Stephen De Young examines what these difficult passages reveal about the nature of Christ and His creation, bearing witness to a world filled not only with pain and suffering - often of human making - but also with the love of God.

Renowned pastor-theologian Gregory A. Boyd tackles the Bible's biggest dilemma. The Old Testament God of wrath and violence versus the New Testament God of love and peace - it's a difference that has troubled Christians since the first century. Now, with the sensitivity of a pastor and the intellect of a theologian, Gregory A. Boyd proposes the "cruciform hermeneutic", a way to read the Old Testament portraits of God through the lens of Jesus' crucifixion.

In this powerful and timely book, one of the most admired and authoritative religious leaders of our time tackles the phenomenon of religious extremism and violence committed in the name of God. If religion is perceived as being part of the problem, Rabbi Sacks argues, then it must also form part of the solution. When religion becomes a zero-sum conceit and individuals are motivated by what Rabbi Sacks calls "altruistic evil", violence between peoples of different beliefs appears to be the only natural outcome.

This book uses evolutionary psychology as a lens to explain religious violence and oppression. The author, a clinical psychologist, examines religious scriptures, rituals, and canon law, highlighting the many ways in which our evolutionary legacy has shaped the development of religion and continues to profoundly influence its expression.

The Spiritual Reality of Pre-Christian Scandinavia Discover the hidden reality of Viking religion beyond myths, sagas, and Marvel stories. For centuries, popular culture has presented Norse belief as a collection of colorful gods and heroic warriors. But examine the archaeological record, and a much darker reality emerges. Religion in the early medieval world was not built on belief or comfort—it was built on obligation, enforcement, and consequence. Viking Rituals and Sacrifice dismantles the romanticized myths to reveal how Norse religion truly functioned. Drawing directly on ...

Paul the Pharisee celebrates not just the New-Paul as Jew but the New-New-Paul as Jewish Pharisee. Granted past Christian, Jewish, and Roman matrices of interpretation, this book explores the historical Paul through the fourth matrix of Evolution. (Think of those matrices as four Russian nesting Matryoshka dolls.) We are not on the Titanic; we are the iceberg. What, then, does Pauline “resurrection” have to do with human evolution?

Gil Bailie wrote Violence Unveiled in the mid-1990s after learning of René Girard’s mimetic theory of human cultural origins. The mimetic theory posits that human interspecies violence posed an existential threat to the continuation of any early human community until the evolution/discovery of a particular kind of directed social violence – scapegoating violence - which in times of social crisis brought peace and harmony to the community at the expense of what would later be understood as a sacred victim or god who becomes a focus of religious awe.

A thrilling and emotional mystery that spans over a century, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Fate. In Chapter Four of the Bible, Cain kills Abel. It is the world's most famous murder. But the Bible is silent about one key detail: the weapon Cain used to kill his...

Have Christians settled for artistic bankruptcy? To understand Jesus and the Bible, you have to understand art. The art God creates and commissions comforts and encourages, and it disturbs and offends. What is art? Does it ever go too far? How should Christians understand, receive, and create it?

For many people, skeptics and believers alike, the Old Testament is rife with controversial passages and events that make both belief and sharing our beliefs with others difficult. Often our solutions have tended toward the extremes—ignore problem passages and pretend they don't matter or obsess over them and treat them as though they are the only thing that matters. Now with clarity of purpose and fidelity to the message and spirit of Scripture as a whole, Tremper Longman confronts pressing questions of concern to modern audiences.

God at War explores the dark attraction between religion and warfare. Virtually every religious tradition leaves behind it a bloody trail of stories, legends, and images of war, and most wars call upon the divine for blessings in battle. This book finds the connection between religion and warfare in the alternative realities created in the human imagination in response to crises both personal and social. 

In the highly acclaimed bestselling A Call to Action, President Jimmy Carter addresses the world’s most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: the ongoing discrimination and violence against women and girls. President Carter was encouraged to write this book by a wide...

Two men crossed into Mesoamerica in search of gold, God and glory. One became the celebrated architect of conquest. The other became the eyewitness determined to stop him taking all the credit. Hernan Cortes and Bernal Diaz del Castillo helped bring down the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan and open the way for Spanish rule. Yet the familiar story of a tiny European force defeating a mighty empire hides a more complicated reality: indigenous alliances, local rivalries, translators, coercion, faith, ambition and calculated violence all shaped the outcome. Cortes and Diaz, Saints or Savages ...

Moving beyond typical conservative and liberal approaches, which seek to either defend or whitewash over violence in the Bible, Disarming Scripture takes a surprising yet compelling approach.

In a near future where technology can reveal past lives with forensic precision, the invention of the reincarnation machine promises radical empathy—and unleashes unprecedented danger. Dr. Mara Voss, architect of the ethical framework behind the machine, believes memory must be mediated to protect civilization from truths it cannot survive. Elias Kade, the machine’s creator, believes the opposite: that truth, unfiltered, is humanity’s final test. Between them stands Jonah, a reluctant organizer of the Reconciliation Movement, who believes mercy can exist without certainty. Blending ...