Weep Not for Your Children: Essays on Religion and Violence

We live in violent times and it is very tempting to make easy and naiuml;ve associations of good and bad, the righteous and the axis of evil. The articles in this book refuse to make such simple, uncritical and comforting distinctions. Indeed, they ask that we look to the origins of our own cultural/religious constructs to see what violence may lurk there and to realize that many acts of violence go almost unnoticed under the umbrella of societal norms or religious morality. This book contains essays from challenging thinkers reflecting on some of the many ways in which religion and violence overlap. It is not a comfortable read but it is a worthwhile one as it asks the reader to think beyond simple associations of religion and violence. Covering topics from the Holocaust to the violence of church music, from the genocide of women within situations of domestic violence, through the violence of economic systems to the violence of gender construction itself the book provokes and challenges.

Rosemary Radford Ruether is the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. For 28 years she was the Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology at the Garrett Theological Seminary and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.