By setting the Irish religious conflict in a wide comparative perspective, this book offers fresh insights into the causes of religious conflicts, and potential means of resolving them. The collection mounts a challenge to widely held views of 'Irish exceptionalism' and points to significant historical and contemporary commonalities across the Western European and North Atlantic worlds.

Experiencing the dimension that lies beyond our empirical grasp of the world has always been a challenge for human beings, for it can expose the limitations of our agency. Such experience, while potentially terrifying, can also furnish a basis for religious faith or hope of a better future. The intercultural essays in this volume analyze ways of dealing with the beyond, including magic, religion, myth, and all-promising utopias.

This volume explores theoretical discourses in which religion is used to legitimize political violence. It examines the ways in which Christianity and Islam are utilized for political ends, in particular how violence is used (or abused) as an expedient to justify political action. This research focuses on premodern as well as contemporary discourses in the Middle East and Latin America, identifying patterns frequently used to justify the deployment of violence in both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic discourses. In addition, it explores how premodern arguments and authorities are utilized and transformed in order to legitimize contemporary violence as well as the ways in which the use of religion as a means to justify violence alters the nature of conflicts that are not otherwise explicitly religious. It argues that most past and present conflicts, even if the discourses about them are conducted in religious terms, have origins other than religion and/or blend religion with other causes, namely socio-economic and political injustice and inequality. Understanding the use and abuse of religion to justify violence is a prerequisite to discerning the nature of a conflict and might thus contribute to conflict resolution.

John Foxe's ground-breaking chronicle of Christian saints and martyrs put to death over centuries remains a landmark text of religious history. The persecution of Christians was for centuries a fact of living in Europe. Adherence to the faith was a great personal risk, with the Roman Empire leading the first of such persecutions against early Christian believers. Many were crucified, put to the sword, or burned alive - gruesome forms of death designed to terrify and discourage others from following the same beliefs. Appearing in 1563, Foxe's chronicle of Christian suffering proved a great success among Protestants. It gave literate Christians the ability to discover and read about brave believers who died for expressing their religion, much as did Jesus Christ. Perhaps in foretelling, the final chapter of the book focuses upon the earliest Christian missions abroad: these, to the Americas, Asia and other locales, would indeed see many more martyrs put to death by the local populations.

In Northern Ireland, a once seemingly intractable conflict is in a state of transformation. Lee A. Smithey offers a grassroots view of that transformation, drawing on interviews, documentary evidence, and extensive field research. He offers essential models for how ethnic and communal-based conflicts can shift from violent confrontation toward peaceful co-existence.
Smithey focuses particularly on Protestant unionists and loyalists in Northern Ireland, who maintain varying degrees of commitment to the Protestant faith, the Crown, and and Ulster / British identity. He argues that antagonistic collective identities in ethnopolitical conflict can become less polarizing as partisans adopt new conflict strategies and means of expressing identity. Consequently, the close relationship between collective identity and collective action is a crucial element of conflict transformation. Smithey closely examines attempts in Protestant/unionist/loyalist communities and organizations to develop more constructive means of expressing collective identity and pursuing political agendas that can help improve community relations. Key leaders and activists have begun to reframe shared narratives and identities, making possible community support for negotiations, demilitarization, and political cooperation, while also diminishing out-group polarization.
As Smithey shows, this kind of shift in strategy and collective vision is the heart of conflict transformation, and the challenges and opportunities faced by grassroots unionists and loyalists in Northern Ireland can prove instructive for other regions of intractable conflict.

Religious terrorism has become the scourge of the modern world. What causes a person to kill innocent strangers in the name of religion? As both a clinical psychologist and an authority on comparative religion, James W. Jones is uniquely qualified to address this increasingly urgent question. Research on the psychology of violence shows that several factors work to make ordinary people turn "evil." These include feelings of humiliation or shame, a tendency to see the world in black and white, and demonization or dehumanization of other people. Authoritarian religion or "fundamentalism," Jones shows, is a particularly rich source of such ideas and feelings, which he finds throughout the writings of Islamic jihadists, such as the 9/11 conspirators.
Jones goes on to apply this model to two very different religious groups that have engaged in violence: Aum Shinrikyo, the Buddhist splinter group behind the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system, and members of the extreme religious right in the U.S. who have advocated and committed violence against abortion providers. Jones notes that not every adherent of an authoritarian group will turn to violence, and he shows how theories of personality development can explain why certain individuals are easily recruited to perform terrorist acts.

This book deals with the religious and ideological consequences of mass conversion in Iberia - where Jews and Muslims were forcibly converted or expelled at the end of the XVth century and beginning of the XVIth- and most specially with the relationship between origins and faith. It also deals with the consequences of coercion on intellectual debates and on the production of knowledge and addresses questions such as dissimulation, dissidence, religious doubt and unbelief.

"Klein's excellent survey of these realities and dynamics will remain an important brief for decision-makers in the future."--"The Journal of Israeli History"

"A book of considerable weight and an important contribution to the growing genre of political studies in Jerusalem."
-- Michael Dumper," Journal of Palestine Studies"

Jerusalem, which means "city of peace," is one of the most bitterly contested territories on earth. Claimed by two peoples and sacred to three faiths, for the last three decades the city has been associated with violent struggle and civil unrest. As the peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis reach their conclusion, the final, and most difficult issue is the status of Jerusalem. How and to what extent will these two nations share this city? How will Christians, Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem and around the world redefine their relationship to Jerusalem when the dust settles on the final agreement? Will the Israelis and Palestinians even be able to reach an agreement at all?

Menachem Klein, one of the leading experts on the history and politics of Jerusalem, cuts through the rhetoric on all sides to explain the actual policies of the Israelis and Palestinians toward the city. He describes the "facts on the ground" that make their competing claims so fraught with tension and difficult to reconcile. He shows how Palestinian national institutions have operated clandestinely since the Israelis occupied the eastern half of the city, and how the Israelis have tried to suppress them. Ultimately, he points the way toward a compromise solution but insists that the struggle for power and cultural recognition will likely continue to be apermanent feature of life in this complicated, multi-cultural city.

The interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between Norse and Saami peoples in the medieval period and focuses on the multifaceted portrayal of Saami peoples in medieval texts. The investigative analysis is anchored in postcolonial methodologies and argues for the inherent need to decolonise the medieval source-material as well as recent historiography. This is achieved by presenting the historiographic and political background of research into Norse-Saami relations, before introducing an overview of textual sources discussing Saami peoples from the classical period to the late 1400s, an analysis of the textual motifs associated with the Saami in medieval literature (their relevance and prevalence), geo-political affairs, trading relations, personal relations and Saami presence in the south. By using decolonising tools to read Norse-Saami relations in medieval texts, influenced by archaeological material and postcolonial frameworks, the study challenges lingering colonial assumptions about the role of the Saami in Norse society. The current research episteme is re-adjusted to offer alternative readings of Saami characters and emphasis is put on agency, fluidity and the dynamic realities of the Saami medieval pasts.

The Children's Crusade was possibly the most extraordinary episode in the history of the crusades. The pueri (children, youngsters) of 1212 set out to recover Jerusalem and the True Cross in medieval Europe's first youth movement. Over the centuries their unarmed crusade has been imagined and re-imagined. The first full-length modern study in English of this memorable popular crusade sheds new light on its history and offers new perspectives on its supposedly dismal outcome. Its richly re-imagined history and mythistory is explored from the thirteenth century to the late-twentieth century. Its mythistorians include: Matthew Paris, Voltaire, D'Annunzio, Brecht, Runciman, Andrzejewski, Bernard Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut and Agatha Christie.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 have turned the world's attention to areas of the globe about which we know very little. Ahmed Rashid, who masterfully explained Afghanistan's Taliban regime in his previous book, here turns his skills as an investigative journalist to the five Central Asian republics adjacent to Afghanistan. Central Asia is coming to play a vital strategic role in the war on terrorism, but the region also poses new threats to global security.

The five Central Asian republics -- Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan -- were part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. Under Soviet rule, Islam was brutally suppressed, and that intolerance has continued under the post-Soviet regimes. Religious repression, political corruption, and the region's extreme poverty (unemployment rates exceed 80 percent in some areas) have created a fertile climate for militant Islamic fundamentalism. Often funded and trained by such organizations as Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and the Taliban, guerrilla movements like the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) have recruited a staggering number of members across the region and threaten to topple the governments of all five nations. Based on groundbreaking research and numerous interviews, Jihad explains the roots of militant rage in Central Asia, describes the goals and activities of these militant organizations, and suggests ways in which this threat could be neutralized by diplomatic and economic intervention.

Rich in both cultural heritage and natural resources -- including massive oil reservoirs -- Central Asia remains desperately poor and frighteningly volatile. In tracing the history of Central Asiaand explaining the current political climate, Rashid demonstrates that it is a region we ignore at our peril.

"We write this account of the Taliban with probably a unique experience and perspective on them. We have a story that intertwines our lives with theirs long before the twin towers were destroyed and the appalling attacks on America had wreaked their havoc. For much of the Western press, the Taliban were just another fundamentalist regime, renowned for their treatment of women, and their ultra-orthodoxy. They are a group now ingrained upon the visual imagination of the western world."Frog and Amy Orr-Ewing

Undoubtedly timely and full of fascinating detail, Sword of Islam is a thorough, well-researched, and revealing account of global Islamic terrorism. A military historian, John F. Murphy Jr. traces the intricate interconnections among various terrorist cells, including Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and its relationship with the Taliban of Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Islamic Moro extremists in the Philippines, obscure Algerian terrorist groups, and other sympathetic underworld organizations in Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and even South America. He also puts recent terrorist attacks in historical context by discussing such key events as the rise of Arab nationalism following Israel's victory in the 1948 war, the Black September killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, the 1976 rescue at Entebbe by Israeli commandos of hostages abducted by German terrorists, the terrorist plots of the infamous "Carlos the Jackal," the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the impact of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Mujahideen resistance of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the same year.
This book supplies the answer to the question that has been on the minds of all Americans since September 11: Why do they hate us? Murphy makes it clear that as the chief backer of Israel the United States is seen by extremists as the evil power behind the hated oZionist enemy.o But he also emphasizes that in the final analysis we are the only country with the power to bring these attacks to a halt.

In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of political activists in New York City joined together to challenge a religious group they believed were hostile to the American values of liberty and freedom. Called the Know Nothings, they started riots during elections, tarred and feathered their political enemies, and barred men from employment based on their religion. The group that caused this uproar?: Irish and German Catholics--then known as the most villainous religious group in America, and widely believed to be loyal only to the Pope. It would take another hundred years before Catholics threw off these xenophobic accusations and joined the American mainstream. The idea that the United States is a stronghold of religious freedom is central to our identity as a nation--and utterly at odds with the historical record. In "American Heretics," historian Peter Gottschalk traces the arc of American religious discrimination and shows that, far from the dominant protestant religions being kept in check by the separation between church and state, religious groups from Quakers to Judaism have been subjected to similar patterns of persecution. Today, many of these same religious groups that were once regarded as anti-thetical to American values are embraced as evidence of our strong religious heritage--giving hope to today's Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious groups now under fire.

Thoroughly exploring the history of the conflict between Christians and Jews from medieval to modern times, this wide-ranging volume includes newly uncovered material from the recently opened post-Soviet archives. Anna Sapir Abulafia delineates controversial issues of inter-faith confrontation, and a number of eminent scholars from around the globe discuss openly and objectively the dynamics of Jewish creative response in the face of violence. Through the analysis of the histories of the Christian and Jewish religious traditions, this book provides a valuable understanding of their relationship as a modern day phenomenon.

Although Christianity's precise influence on the Holocaust cannot be determined and the Christian churches did not themselves perpetrate the Final Solution, Robert Michael argues in "Holy Hatred" that the two millennia of Christian ideas and prejudices and their impact on Christians' behavior appear to be the major basis of antisemitism and of the apex of antisemitism, the Holocaust.

While concentrated on the famous Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, this book focuses on an area that has so far been somewhat marginalized or even overlooked by modern interpreters: the recontextualizing of the Passio Perpetuae in the subsequent reception of this text in the literature of the early Church. Since its composition in the early decades of the 3rd century, the Passio Perpetuae was enjoying an extraordinary authority and popularity. However, it contained a number of revolutionary and innovative features that were in conflict with existing social and theological conventions. This book analyses all relevant texts from the 3rd to 5th centuries in which Perpetua and her comrades are mentioned, and demonstrates the ways in which these texts strive to normalize the innovative aspects of the Passio Perpetuae. These efforts, visible as they are already on careful examination of the passages of the editor of the passio, continue from Tertullian to Augustine and his followers. The normalization of the narrative reaches its peak in the so-called Acta Perpetuae which represent a radical rewriting of the original and an attempt to replace it by a purified text, more compliant with the changed socio-theological hierarchies.

The question of sectarianism in Scotland belongs within a wider framework than it has hitherto been placed. It offers insights into continuing, indeed pressing, debates about religious identity and civil and political society in the modern world. This book questions the view that religion and politics do not, and cannot, mix in pluralistic, tolerant and increasingly secular societies, and reveals that memories--bitter memories--can outlive and obscure the demise of actual conflict.

An award-winning journalist's extraordinary account of being kidnapped and tortured in Syria by al Qaeda for two years--a revelatory memoir about war, human nature, and endurance that's "the best of the genre, profound, poetic, and sorrowful" (The Atlantic). In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish border town to write and report on the Syrian civil war. One afternoon in October, while walking through an olive grove, he met three young Syrians--who turned out to be al Qaeda operatives--and they captured him and kept him prisoner for nearly two years. On his first day, in the first of many prisons, Padnos was given a blindfold--a grime-stained scrap of fabric--that was his only possession throughout his horrific ordeal. Now, Padnos recounts his time in captivity in Syria, where he was frequently tortured at the hands of the al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al Nusra. We learn not only about Padnos's harrowing experience, but we also get a firsthand account of life in a Syrian village, the nature of Islamic prisons, how captors interrogate someone suspected of being CIA, the ways that Islamic fighters shift identities and drift back and forth through the veil of Western civilization, and much more. No other journalist has lived among terrorists for as long as Theo has--and survived. As a resident of thirteen separate prisons in every part of rebel-occupied Syria, Theo witnessed a society adrift amid a steady stream of bombings, executions, torture, prayer, fasting, and exhibitions, all staged by the terrorists. Living within this tide of violence changed not only his personal identity but also profoundly altered his understanding of how to live. Offering fascinating, unprecedented insight into the state of Syria today, Blindfold is "a triumph of the human spirit" (The New York Times Book Review)--combining the emotional power of a captive's memoir with a journalist's account of a culture and a nation in conflict that is as urgent and important as ever.