In God's Name

Despite widespread trends of secularization in the twentieth century, religion has played an important role in several outbreaks of genocide since the First World War. This collection of essays examines the intersection between religion and state-organized murder in the cases of the Armenian, Jewish, Rwandan, and Bosnian genocides. Rather than a comprehensive overview, it offers a series of discrete, yet closely related, case studies that shed light on three fundamental aspects of this issue: the use of religion to legitimize and motivate genocide; the potential of religious faith to encourage physical and spiritual resistance to mass murder; and, finally, the role of religion in coming to terms with the legacy of atrocity.