New Cavanaugh book out in August
2009 February 16
Looks like William T. Cavanaugh’s long awaited book on religious violence will be out this August from Oxford University Press. Amazon.com is listing The Myth of Religous Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict already and gives the following description:
The idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East. William T. Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores how the category ‘religion’ has been constructed in the modern West and in colonial contexts according to specific configurations of political power. Cavanaugh draws on this scholarship to examine how timeless and transcultural categories of ‘religion and ‘the secular’ are used in arguments that religion causes violence. He argues three points: 1) There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion. What counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of political configurations of power; 2) Such a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion as non-rational and prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of Western society; 3) This myth can be and is used to legitimate neo-colonial violence against non-Western others, particularly the Muslim world.
Looks like this will be an interesting book to read. Watching out for it.
Woo hoo. This looks good.
Sweet! I’ve been waiting for this for some time.
that last point seems to hit the nail on the head. the whole narrative is a way of reorganizing society/the polis so that political liberalism can aim its own violence at new targets.
Great, more awesome theology I have spend my hard earned money on. Thanks a lot, jerks.
Very interesting … it looks like he’s really expanding the religion portion of his argument in Theopolitical Imagination . I wonder where he’s going to go with this study of the “genealogy” of religious violence from a political perspective or, rather, how elaborate he’s going to get politically speaking. Another peek at Milbank, or at least having him handy, might help the reading of this new book too, especially on the “secular.”