76 books like Blood Sacrifice and the Nation

This country was settled primarily by Puritan extremists who imprinted their deep distrust of the body’s needs onto future generations. The Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination led to a uniquely American situation. As wealth became a sign of grace, poverty indicated moral failure.

Weber’s classic book describes the process in which a perspective that began in renunciation was transformed into the drive to work incessantly in the pursuit of worldly success and, eventually, conspicuous consumption. As the strictly religious fervor dissipated over time, the competitive quest for efficiency, productivity, wealth, and the self-validation they symbolized remained and became our most fundamental value.

What others would later call the “American Dream” endures because, like no other myth, it promises fulfillment both in this world and the next. This helped me understand our obsession with individualism and why America ignores or mistreats many of its children simply because their parents are… show more.

My introduction to world mythology was Joseph Campbell, who described a nearly universal narrative – or monomyth – in which a young man (such as Christ, Percival, or the Buddha) ventures from his land, defeats opponents or temptations and returns with a critical gift for his people.

America, however, inverted this myth in profoundly important ways. In our story, repeated over three centuries in thousands of sermons, novels, movies, television, and video games, an innocent and racially pure community is threatened by evil (usually non-white).

When democratic institutions fail to suppress the threat, a selfless superhero arrives – from elsewhere – to defeat the villains and restore the community to harmony. Then, however, disdaining the feminine values of community and relationship, this hero disappears (often into the West).

I realized that he is the model for both our ideas of distant fathering as well as our unshakable belief in American… show more.

This Black sociologist demands that we take a deep look into the religious basis of American racism.

Of 5,000 cases of lynching reported between 1880 and 1930, at least 40% functioned as actual human sacrifices, very large communal rituals that identified certain individuals as the source of the community’s problems and eliminated them. The sacrifice created a compact between the people and their deities, expiating their sins and reinforcing their values.

"The victim mediated between the sacred and the profane...the burning cross distilled it all: sacrificed Negro joined by the torch with sacrificed Christ, burnt together and discarded...” Well into the 20th century, “The cross – Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death – became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.” Forced to carry all the projections of the white unconscious, the Black man became the American Dionysus.

Patterson observes that in recent generations the stereotype of America’s internal… show more.

This journalist, screenwriter, and novelist is well-versed in psychology, mythology, history, and musicology. His essay in this book, Hear That Long Snake Moan, is the single best piece of non-fiction I have ever read, and it inspired me to write my book.

Our disease – the Western divorce of consciousness from flesh – appears as consumerism, environmental degradation, fundamentalism, perpetual war, genocide, and racism. Yet, mysteriously, it may be possible that the terrible uprooting and enslavement of some fifty million black people over three centuries actually initiated a great healing process.

For all its sorrows, the twentieth century saw periods when Dionysian madness seized the Apollonian mind in its flight from the body and brought it back to Earth. African-American music fundamentally altered America and began the slow process of cleaning out the festering wounds underlying puritanism, nationalism, and materialism. We have a long way to go, but Ventura has… show more.

It was this book that really put the pieces together for me regarding how my personal religious beliefs and my status as an American citizen should intersect.

Growing up in Christian spaces it was assumed that to be a good American was to be Christian, and to be a good Christian was to be American. Boyd’s book helped me distinguish the two in a new and fresh way.

Here is a book ahead of its time, a work that anticipated the breakdown in globalization to imagine something else – manufacturing clustered closer to customers and a rejection of the sort of efficiency that does not bother to measure the costs of not being able to find medicines in the midst of a pandemic.

Gellner is, for me, one of the most original social thinkers of our time and shocks you out of your assumptions.

In this book, among much else, he offers the most incisive version of his theory of nationalism. Turning Kedourie on his head just as Marx did to Hegel, he argues that nationalist ideas are so much froth and are a product of larger structural forces. They arise in the transition from agro-literate to industrial societies.

Nationalism’s real significance is not a return to a folk past, but its creation of high cultures in the language of the people propagated in national educational systems that provide the basis of scientific modernity. So far from being a cause of war, nationalism makes a liberal international order possible.

Brilliantly written, this is an iconoclastic counter to both Smith and Kedourie.

The pressures modernity and European governments (Great Britain especially), brought upon peoples of the Middle East in the late imperial age are here re-presented. In this revisionary study Lorenzo Kamel, Associate Professor of History at the University of Turin, "demonstrates how the heterogeneous identities of Middle Eastern peoples were sealed into a standardized and uniform version that persists today." Extensively researched and full of new material, Kamel’s book shows how the region transitioned from empire into nation-states, and how the modern ethnically-conceived countries of Israel and modern Turkey, and embattled ones like Lebanon and Iraq, came into being.

This is fun to read.

Kedourie passionately hates nationalism, which he sees as an irrational millenarian movement born of Enlightenment intellectuals who debunk religion and tradition. He disparages it as a "children’s crusade" on the part of a new group of educated young excluded from power that they see as their right. They promise that the overthrow of the existing order will deliver liberation and earthly salvation but this produces only revolution, war, and tyranny.

It is vividly written, with brilliant characterisations of individual nationalists. This unbalanced critique proposes that wrong ideas, such as national self-determination, have disastrous consequences. But it contains important insights into the "dark side" of nationalism.

Kedourie (1926-1992) was a scholar of Middle Eastern history who also exerted quite an influence upon the field of nationalism studies. This was achieved through his famous Nationalism and the follow-up project cited here. The diverse sources collected in Nationalism in Asia and Africa are introduced with a lengthy opening essay in which Kedourie attempts to account for the ‘family resemblance’ among the movements in question (mainly of late 19th and early 20th-century vintage). The sources themselves are far from ordinary. See for example document 17, which details the final days of an imprisoned Egyptian political dissident – these spent pouring over a few prized works (Bagehot, Rousseau, a volume of Arabic poetry, and the Koran) and scratching out with his boot lace a plan for the "constitution of a Muslim government." Kedourie can indeed surprise and intrigue the reader with his choices.