Beyond Sacred Violence

Download or read book Beyond Sacred Violence written by Kathryn McClymond and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-07-02 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the modern Western world's reductive understanding of sacrifice simplifies an enormously broad and dynamic cluster of religious activities, drawing on a comparative study of Vedic and Jewish sacrificial practices to demonstrate not only that sacrifice has no single, essential, identifying characteristic, but also that the elements most frequently attributed to such acts--death and violence--are not universal.