Despite the massive growth of the military industrial complex in the U.S., the sacred canopy of war as ‗a necessary sacrifice‘ obfuscates the pernicious reality of U.S. war-culture. This book theologically explores and ethically interrogates sacrificial frameworks and assumptions that electrify and normalize war-culture in the post-9/11 period of the U.S. It questions whether theological sacrificial frameworks may be rehabilitated, and if it is possible to “detranscendentalize” war.
A brief synopsis of Soelle‘s book, On Suffering.
This article first explores and exposes the interpenetration of the ethos, institutions, and culture of militarism in the United States‘ culture at large. Second, the article investigates the rhetoric and practices of sacrifice that run like a current between war-culture and popular understandings of Christianity in the United States. Frameworks of sacrifice animate war-culture and simultaneously mask its operations with a sacred canopy.
What would we say about the losses associated with war if we did not describe them as sacrifices? How is this experience influenced by narratives of Jesus‘ cosmic sacrificial self-giving? This article explores the electrical exchange of sacrificial frameworks in U.S. war-culture and popular Christian understandings and practices to ask: Is there a way to rehabilitate understandings of sacrifice in Christianity without aiding and abetting war?