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Featured Selections in History In "Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore," Michael Olesker writes of the American melting pot--particularly Baltimore's--in all its rollicking, sentimental, and chaotic essence. Learn more | See related books
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This is perhaps one of the most ambitious books I've ever read, and perhaps one of the most timely. As terrorists set about beheading hostages in Syria and Iraq in the name of Islam, Karen Armstrong has published a exhaustive analysis that sets out to get us to accept the proposition that it may not be religious doctrine alone that is responsible for violence.
In other words, enough of the lazy thinking.
Not that Armstrong herself would ever be rude enough to use a phrase like that. On the contrary, she simply lays out her theory, and lets the evidence do the talking. She clearly recognizes the strong opinions that people today have on her chosen topic, which is precisely why she has focused on it. She equally clearly believes that their exhausted cliches simply aren't up to the task of describing the far more complicated reality. Indeed, religious violence, she states flatly, may have less to do with religion than with politics and social order.
To make her case, Armstrong goes all the way back to the Sumerians, and the rise of agrarian societies that produced a surplus: a surplus that was purloined by the elite, who kept the vast community of peasants at subsistence level and kept them in line with their religious order. Indeed, in Armstrong's analysis, from the earliest days until the Enlightenment and the modern era, the sacred was tied intimately to political authority and political legitimately. And it was balanced. If violence was religious (the Inquisition; the crusades) so, too, were thoughtful leaders advocating peace and harmony (the Buddha, the Jains, on down to St. Francis and even Salah-ad-Din, who allowed Christians to leave Jerusalem unharmed at the height of the crusades.Read more ›
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62 of 67 people found the following review helpful
Karen Armstrong's new book offers a dense but readable overview of the relationship between religion and violence. Although she only cites one of them by name, and that only briefly, Armstrong is plainly responding to the spate of books and articles by New Atheists arguing that religion causes much of the world's violence. Her counter-argument is that, while religion has often played a role in mass violence, other political and social factors are also relevant, and that the role of religion in public life has often been to reduce violence as well as to increase it. Her survey focuses heavily on the history of the three Abrahamic faiths, though ancient Indian and Chinese traditions are also discussed in the opening chapters. Broadly speaking, Armstrong's argument is convincing. It helps that she is less reductive and dogmatic than those to whom she is replying, allowing for the unpleasant side of religious history without allowing it to warp her presentation.
That's not to say she's perfectly even-handed or always persuasive, though. The early chapters deal with periods for which hard evidence is scant to non-existent, so some degree of reconstruction is required, opening up the possibility that Armstrong is unconsciously interpreting the evidence in a way that fits her theory. (Her model of ancient Israelite and Jewish history, for example, involves a peaceful, communal tradition in which the only violent and authoritarian impulses come from the Priestly redactors. Possible, I suppose, but not especially likely.) One also wonders why Armstrong has chosen the traditions she has, and not brought in the indigenous religions of Africa, North and South America, etc. But of course no book can do everything, and the scope of this one is already considerable.Read more ›
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong is a scholarly look at the correlation, or lack thereof, of religion and violence from the formation of the first primitive communities through today. Armstrong examines all religions, with a particular focus on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The first part of the book focuses on the formation of organized communities as well as the corresponding religion in various regions of the Eurasian continent. In every community, violence is first seen not when religion comes on the scene, but when people are organized into communities and resources become scarce, or a ruling group raises to the top and wants to keep their power. It was the forming of agricultural communities that allowed for a surplus of food, which allowed a small group from the community to control the surplus and in effect rule everyone else. It was only through violence that a surplus was maintained. Armstrong seems to find no direct correlation between religion and violence. Instead, in each community, both existed and fused and some later point.
Another key point is that religion as we see it now is not how it was viewed through most of history. There was no distinction between the sacred and the secular. All aspects of life were intertwined and therefore, while it may seem to us that there was a causal relationship between religion and violence, the ancient peoples who lived the events would never have seen things that way. The sacred was secular, and the secular sacred; to split the two and say strictly religious motivations, or strictly the competition for resources is what drove violence, would be as foreign a concept to them as the smart phone.Read more ›
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