Empire of Sacrifice

Empire of Sacrifice
Author: Jon Pahl
Publsiher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2012-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814768952

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It is widely recognized that American culture is both exceptionally religious and exceptionally violent. Americans participate in religious communities in high numbers, yet American citizens also own guns at rates far beyond those of citizens in other industrialized nations. Since September 11, 2001, U.S. scholars have understandably discussed religious violence in terms of terrorist acts, a focus that follows U.S. policy. Yet, according to Jon Pahl, to identify religious violence only with terrorism fails to address the long history of American violence rooted in religion throughout the country's history. In Empire of Sacrifice, Pahl explains how both of these distinctive features of American culture work together by exploring how constructions along the lines of age, race, and gender have operated to centralize cultural power across American civil or cultural religions in ways that don't always appear to be “religious” at all. Pahl traces the development of these forms of systemic violence throughout American history and focuses an intense light on the complex and durable interactions between religion and violence in American history, from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush's Baghdad.

Empire of Sacrifice

Empire of Sacrifice
Author: Jon Pahl
Publsiher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010-01-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780814767641

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It is widely recognized that American culture is both exceptionally religious and exceptionally violent. Americans participate in religious communities in high numbers, yet American citizens also own guns at rates far beyond those of citizens in other industrialized nations. Since 9/11, United States scholars have understandably discussed religious violence in terms of terrorist acts, a focus that follows United States policy. Yet, according to Jon Pahl, to identify religious violence only with terrorism fails to address the long history of American violence rooted in religion throughout the country’s history. In essence, Americans have found ways to consider blessed some very brutal attitudes and behaviors both domestically and globally. In Empire of Sacrifice, Pahl explains how both of these distinctive features of American culture work together by exploring how constructions along the lines of age, race, and gender have operated to centralize cultural power across American civil or cultural religions in ways that don’t always appear to be "religious" at all. Pahl traces the development of these forms of systemic violence throughout American history, using evidence from popular culture, including movies such as Rebel without a Cause and Reefer Madness and works of literature such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Handmaid's Tale, to illuminate historical events. Throughout, Pahl focuses an intense light on the complex and durable interactions between religion and violence in American history, from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush’s Baghdad.

City of Sacrifice

City of Sacrifice
Author: David Carrasco
Publsiher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2000-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807046434

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At an excavation of the Great Aztec Temple in Mexico City, amid carvings of skulls and a dismembered warrior goddess, David Carrasco stood before a container filled with the decorated bones of infants and children. It was the site of a massive human sacrifice, and for Carrasco the center of fiercely provocative questions: If ritual violence against humans was a profound necessity for the Aztecs in their capital city, is it central to the construction of social order and the authority of city states? Is civilization built on violence? In City of Sacrifice,Carrasco chronicles the fascinating story of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, investigating Aztec religious practices and demonstrating that religious violence was integral to urbanization; the city itself was a temple to the gods. That Mexico City, the largest city on earth, was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, is a point Carrasco poignantly considers in his comparison of urban life from antiquity to modernity. Majestic in scope, City of Sacrifice illuminates not only the rich history of a major Meso american city but also the inseparability of two passionate human impulses: urbanization and religious engagement. It has much to tell us about many familiar events in our own time, from suicide bombings in Tel Aviv to rape and murder in the Balkans.

Inka Human Sacrifice and Mountain Worship

Inka Human Sacrifice and Mountain Worship
Author: Thomas Besom
Publsiher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780826353085

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The Inka empire was the largest pre-Columbian polity in the New World. Its vast expanse, its ethnic diversity, and the fact that the empire may have been consolidated in less than a century have prompted much scholarly interest in its creation. In this study, Besom explores the ritual practices of human sacrifice and the worship of mountains, attested in both archaeological investigations and ethnohistorical sources, as tools in the establishment and preservation of political power. Besom examines the relationship between symbols, ideology, ritual, and power to demonstrate how the Cuzqueños could have used rituals to manipulate common Andean symbols to uphold their authority over subjugated peoples. He considers ethnohistoric accounts of the categories of human sacrifice to gain insights into related rituals and motives, and reviews the ethnohistoric evidence of mountain worship to predict locations as well as motives. He also analyzes specific archaeological sites and assemblages, theorizing that they were the locations of sacrifices designed to assimilate subject peoples, bind conquered lands to the state, and/or justify the extraction of local resources.

Ritual Dynamics and Religious Change in the Roman Empire

Ritual Dynamics and Religious Change in the Roman Empire
Author: O. Hekster,Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner,Christian Witschel
Publsiher: BRILL
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2009-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789047428275

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This volume presents the proceedings of the eighth workshop of the international network 'Impact of Empire', which concentrates on the history of the Roman Empire. It focuses on the impact the Roman Empire had on changes in ritual and further religious behaviour in the empire.

The End of Sacrifice

The End of Sacrifice
Author: Susan Emanuel,Guy G. Stroumsa
Publsiher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2011-08-22
Genre: Electronic Book
ISBN: 9781459627529

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The religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West's greatest thinkers. But, according to Guy Stroumsa, the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within the Greco - Roman world from polytheism to monotheism, he argues that the cause for this shift can be found not so much around the Mediterranean as in the Near East. The End of Sacrifice points to the role of Judaism, particularly its inventions of new religious life following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The end of animal sacrifice gave rise to new forms of worship, with a concern for personal salvation, scriptural study, rituals like praying and fasting, and the rise of religious communities and monasticism. It is what Christianity learned from Judaism about texts, death, and, above all, sacrifice that allowed it to supersede Greco - Roman religions and, Stroumsa argues, transform religion itself. A concise and original approach to a much - studied moment in religious history, The End of Sacrifice will be heralded by all scholars of late antiquity.

Star Wars Legacy of the Force V Sacrifice

Star Wars  Legacy of the Force V   Sacrifice
Author: Karen Traviss
Publsiher: Random House
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2012-10-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781448164400

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SACRIFICE is the fifth book in the 9-book Legacy of the Force series, a bold new Star Wars story arc for fans of the New Jedi Order and the franchise's most popular characters: Luke, Han, and Leia. This is the middle book in the series and the second of three hardcovers. The adventure continues, and one of our storylines comes to a crucial and shocking climax. Things come to a head in the galaxy of the Skywalker and Solos when Jacen Solo makes a horrifying decision from which there is no going back. For Luke, Han and Leia, nothing will ever be the same again...

Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice

Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice
Author: Jennifer Wright Knust,Zsuzsanna Varhelyi
Publsiher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780199876402

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An investigation of the multiple meanings and functions of sacrifice in diverse religious texts and practices from the late Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods.