Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence - Hardcover

This book helps us understand one of the most disturbing and perplexing phenomena of modern life-the emergence of religious violence as a major factor in world affairs. Selengut surveys the literature in the field and rightly focuses on the idea of sacred war as religion's potent contribution to charged political encounters. He brings psychological perspectives to bear in helping us understand how marginalized people, adopting religious images of divine conquest, engage in terrorism and other acts of public violence out of a sense of spiritual mission. This will be a helpful volume both for classroom use and public discussion. It helps us think anew about the causes of religious violence and how we should appropriately respond. -- Mark Juergensmeyer, Professor of Sociology and Global Studies, University of California The reasoned juxtaposition of theoretic orientation and examples ... makes this volume an outstanding-indeed necessary-contribution to understanding religion and its operation in the larger society. Essential. -- L. Braude, SUNY College at Fredonia CHOICE This is a well-argued and systematically documented book, and it raises an important issue and points to a major gap in criminological thought. It provides a critical perspective on criminology's failure to anticipate and fully explain many emerging global issues of violence and security. Criminal Justice Review Charles Selengut has been for many years a recognized authority in the area of modern Judaism and religious fundamentalism. With Sacred Fury, he distills his vast knowledge not only of Judaism, but of all the 'Peoples of the Book'-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-into a lucid and meticulously researched presentation. The book more than succeeds in presenting the complexities of religiously motivated violence in an accessible and very readable textbook which would be of great use to undergraduates, graduate students, and the general public. Sacred Fury is a must for classes concerned with the issues of religious fundamentalism and religious violence. -- Jeffrey Kaplan, (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh)

Accounts of religious violence litter our headlines. But how religious is this religious violence? And what drives adherents to attack in the name of their faith? Charles Selengut brings together approaches from a wide range of disciplines to comprehend all the forms of religious violence from around the globe. Drawing from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 9-11 attacks, Heaven's Gate, the Catholic sex abuse scandal , and many other recent cases, Selengut explains the logics behind these seemingly senseless acts. Looking at religious violence through the perspectives of holy war, psychology, apocalypse; through perpectives of the body and of civilizations, Sacred Fury gives students a deep and rich understanding of what can drive the religious to violence. Because of its broad range of examples and perspectives, because of its clear, strong and yet sensitive tone, Sacred Fury provides the best introduction to the pressing questions of religious violence.