Episode notes
In 2009 the landmark monograph of William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, was published by Oxford University Press. In that work, Cavanaugh showed how the term “religious violence” is not just an uncomplicated description of tragic phenomena witnessed all too frequently around the world. On the contrary, he argued, it is a foundational myth of western societies that denigrate religious actors as irrational and their conflicts as intractable while at the same time concealing and legitimating state violence against those same actors.
Now in 2024, fifteen years later, it seems that many of the global conflicts – certainly in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as elsewhere in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the US itself – which have embroiled college campuses and play ...
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