Series
Volume 4
War and Genocide
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In God's Name
Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack
With a conclusion by Ian Kershaw
416 pages, index
ISBN 978-1-57181-214-8 $145.00/£107.00 / Hb / Published (April 2001)
ISBN 978-1-57181-302-2 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Published (April 2001)
eISBN 978-1-78238-165-5 eBook
Description
Despite the widespread trends of secularization in the 20th century, religion has played an important role in several outbreaks of genocide since the First World War. And yet, not many scholars have looked either at the religious aspects of modern genocide, or at the manner in which religion has taken a position on mass killing. This collection of essays addresses this hiatus by examining 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 descrete, 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.
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018) along with several other well-regarded scholarly works on the Holocaust and genocide, including Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (2013) and Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2015).
Phyllis Mack is Professor of History, Director of Graduate Studies and has been Acting Director of the Institute for Research on Women at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.