Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred by Douglas Hedley (Reader in Hermeneutics and Metaphysics and Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge, UK) is an original exploration of the idea of sacrifice by one of the world’s preeminent philosophers of religion.
Despisers of religion have poured scorn upon the idea of sacrifice as an index of the irrational and wicked in religious practice. Nor does its secularised form seem much more appealing. One need only think of the appalling cult of sacrifice in numerous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet, as a frequent concern of both religion and literature, sacrifice remains a part of our cultural and intellectual ‘imaginary’ . Hedley proposes good reasons to think that issues of global conflict and the ecological crisis highlight the continuing relevance of the topic of sacrifice for contemporary culture.
Approaching his subject neither anthropologically nor strictly theologically, Hedley takes on prevailing theories of sacrifice from the perspective of imagination, exploring the imagery and symbolism that have been associated with sacrifice over the course of Western history. Specifically, he challenges the claims of two highly-influential books, René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred and Walter Burkert’s Homo nacens, both of which conceive of sacrifice as an act of violence. Guided instead by (the much misunderstood) Joseph de Maistre and the Cambridge Platonists, Hedley presents a compelling theory of sacrifice as renunciation of the will.
Sacrifice Imagined, now available from Continuum in the US and coming to the UK in just two short weeks, is the second volume in Douglas Hedley’s trilogy on the religious imagination. The first volume, Living Forms of the Imagination, explores the importance of imagination as a key concept in religious thought and was published by T&T Clark/Continuum in 2008. Hedley is currently working on a third and final volume, tentatively titled The Iconic Imagination, which concentrates on images of the transcendent sacred One and the redemptive power of art.
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More endorsements for Sacrifice Imagined:
“Douglas Hedley calls on the resources of philosophy, theology, poetry, and art to look into the deep and difficult subject of sacrifice, suffering, and atonement. This is a remarkable, profound, and erudite new study, which no one who wants to think hard about these issues should ignore.” --Timothy Chappell, Professor of Philosophy, The Open University, UK
“In this impressively learned work Douglas Hedley challenges numerous contemporary orthodoxies in both philosophy and theology, and at the same time succeeds in defending the continuing relevance of the Platonist tradition.” -- David Brown, FBA, Wardlaw Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture, University of St Andrews, UK
“Sacrifice has, in recent years, become once again the subject of an interdisciplinary, scholarly debate. Dr. Hedley's book will make an important contribution to this debate. Written from a perspective that is consciously theological and consciously Platonic, it argues for the abiding significance of sacrifice as a dimension of human culture. For Dr. Hedley, sacrifice ultimately is the work of human imagination and indispensable from an epistemic, metaphysical, ethical, and religious point of view. Given the tradition of radical critique of sacrifice in both Christian and post-Christian theories, this argument will inevitably be controversial. Yet even those readers who may not be fully persuaded by Dr. Hedley's thesis must be immensely grateful for the wealth of references to past and present thinkers and for the subtle analysis of their ideas that is here put at their disposal.” -- Johannes Zachhuber, Reader in Theology, Trinity College, University of Oxford, UK
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