Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The relationship between religion and violence – however one defines either of those terms – forms a central part of the political discourse, as well as the lived reality, of modern times. In the summer of 2010, Americans from all corners of the nation passionately debated the propriety of a Muslim cultural center just blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks, a debate that revived all the painful memories associated with that event and fed ongoing arguments about whether Islam was a “violent religion” or a “religion of peace.” Daily headlines bring news of violent conflicts in hotspots around the world, many of which are fired by religious rhetoric, while a steady stream of publications by the “New Atheists” denounce the tendency of religions of all kinds toward violence, irrationality, and destruction, in the process spawning a counter-literature even more extensive than the work it arose to contest ( Hitchens 2009 ; Dennett 2006 ; Harris 2005 ; McGrath 2010 ; Haught 2007 ; Dawkins 2008 ). And yet so many important questions go unaddressed in these sensationalized headlines, the charges and countercharges of polarized political debate, and the provocative claims of the New Atheists and their critics. If religion and violence, and their (apparent) close connection are all around us, far more rare are accounts of these two phenomena that do more than scratch the ... log in or subscribe to read full text