[Recenzija] : Eller, Jack David; Cruel creeds, virtuous violence

Abstract

Though in the last decades inter- and cross-disciplinary research overstepping the purported boundary between humanities and social sciences is becoming more common, there are still way too few books in relieious studies (as humanities social sciences. This, however, is precisely what Jack David Eller does in his Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence across Culture and History. The book starts with two theoretical chapters, each concerned with one of the two major keywords of the book - 'violence' and 'religion'. The first, on violence, is a welldone expose of what should and what should not necessarily count as violence. Eller goes to lengths in providing a comprehensive overview of the causes and consequences as well as the contents of violence in generic terms, with arguments drawn from the social sciences. The second chapter focuses on the concept of 'religion', which the author argues to be much more complex than is generally perceived. The two introductory chapters not only skillfully problematize the issue of 'religious violence', understood by author as violence by humans which is 'directed toward religious objects and goals or related to religious groups and beliefs and causes' (p. 52), but also lay a solid ground for the following thematic chapters, which pretty much cover the variety of historically found religion-inspired violence, ranging from violence administered to self (self-injury, Ch. 4) to that addressed toward other humans (sacrifice, Ch. 3; persecution, Ch. 5; ethnoreligious conflict, Ch. 6; war, Ch. 7; and even homidde and abuse, Ch. 8).[...]