God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Tom Parks
Audiobook
4 hr 41 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

For decades, Mark Juergensmeyer has been studying the rise of religious violence around the world, including groups like ISIS and Christian militias that have been involved in acts of terrorism. Over the years he came to realize that war is the central image in the worldview of virtually every religious movement engaged in violent acts. Behind the moral justification of using violence are images of great confrontations of war on a transcendent scale. God at War explores the dark attraction between religion and warfare. Virtually every religious tradition leaves behind it a bloody trail of stories, legends, and images of war, and most wars call upon the divine for blessings in battle. This book finds the connection between religion and warfare in the alternative realities created in the human imagination in response to crises both personal and social. Based on the author's thirty years of field work interviewing activists involved in religious-related terrorist movements around the world, this book explains why desperate social conflict leads to images of war, and why invariably God is thought to be engaged in battle.

About the author

Mark Juergensmeyer is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was founding director of the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God.

Since recording his first book for the Kansas Audio Reader Network in 1985, Tom Parks has enjoyed giving voice to stories. He has been nominated for Audie Awards and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards, and reviewers have described his performances as "conversational," "energetic," and "sincere."

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