Atalia Omer is Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace Studies in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN. She is the author of When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Review: Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, by Jon Pahl
October 2013: When Did We See You, Lord? (Volume 13 Issue 6)
Pahl illuminates the motif of “sacrifice” or “blessed brutalities” as one permeating all layers of the social and cultural fabrics in ways that purport to offer an explanatory framework for the analysis of contemporary imperial American practices. He reads patterns of “sacrifice” or “performative violence” into practices as diverse as domestic abuse, slavery, and cinematic representations of youth in order to gesture to their inter-linking with one another and to expose the misguided religiosity of such practices.