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Title details for Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong - Available

Fields of Blood

Religion and the History of Violence

by Karen Armstrong
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From the renowned and bestselling 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 the decline. Some have cited a perception that began to grow after September 11: that faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance and divisiveness—something bad for society. But how accurate is that view? And does it apply equally to all faiths? In these troubled times, we risk basing decisions of real and dangerous consequence on mistaken understandings of the faiths subscribed around us, in our immediate community as well as globally. And so, with her deep learning and sympathetic understanding, Karen Armstrong examines the impulse toward violence in each of the world's great religions.      
          The comparative approach is new: while there have been plenty of books on jihad or the Crusades, this book lays the Christian and the Islamic way of war side by side, along with those of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism and Judaism. Each of these faiths arose in agrarian societies with plenty of motivation for violence: landowners had to lord it over peasants and warfare was essential to increase one's landholdings, the only real source of wealth before the great age of trade and commerce. In each context, it fell to the priestly class to legitimize the actions of the state. And so the martial ethos became bound up with the sacred. At the same time, however, their ideologies developed that ran counter to the warrior code: around sages, prophets and mystics. Within each tradition there grew up communities that represented a protest against the injustice and violence endemic to agrarian society. This book explores the symbiosis of these 2 impulses and its development as these confessional faiths came of age.
         The aggression of secularism has often damaged religion and pushed it into a violent mode. But modernity has also been spectacularly violent, and so Armstrong goes on to show how and in what measure religions, in their relative maturity, came to absorb modern belligerence—and what hope there might be for peace among believers in our time.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 28, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780307401984

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780307401984
      • File size: 2522 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 8, 2014
      Bracing as ever, Armstrong (The Case for God) sweeps through religious history around the globe and over 4,000 years to explain the yoking of religion and violence and to elucidate the ways in which religion has also been used to counter violence. She goes back to the beginnings of human social organization and into the human brain itself to explain the origins of social structural violence as humans moved from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies into more socially stratified agrarian cultures that produced enough surplus to fight over, and violent myths that justified conflict. From there she reads sacred texts of numerous cultures to find their contradictions: they portray and justify but they also strive to check it. Ahimsa (nonviolence) is an ancient Indian concept; Israel’s prophets thundered against its kings; Christianity turned its other cheek but also mounted Crusades. She relates—at length—contemporary terrorism to politics and regional histories: “As an inspiration for terrorism... nationalism has been far more productive than religion.” The comparative nature of her inquiry is refreshing, and it’s supported by 80 pages of footnotes and bibliography. Provocative and supremely readable. Announced first printing of 150,000.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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