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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Words Hurt: Discourse and Violence in the History of Religion

Words Hurt: Discourse and Violence in the History of Religion

Knust, Jennifer W.
Berzon, Todd S.
Castelli, Elizabeth A.

Hardcover

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismReligion General

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 5, 2027

ISBN10: 1531514871
ISBN13: 9781531514877
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: Jan 5 2027
Pages: 352
Language: English

Investigates how discourse spills from language to action, generating, obfuscating, and perpetuating violence while also offering the words, principles, and practices that may interrupt it

We are continually catching up with and being caught by words, especially words that hurt. These collected essays probe the interaction of violence and words across time, place, and circumstance. Often cited as the core source of violence, religion's capacity for coordinating ideas, symbols, and groups has made it a potent force in the production and deflection of violence. Yet the production of the category religion has also contributed to violence; employed to surveille and subjugate targeted populations, religion enabled and conveyed colonial domination on a global scale. The claim that religion causes violence has therefore missed a fundamental insight: As a word, religion also acts in and on the world. Contributors thus ask: How does persecution become weaponized in and through language? Whose stories are told and who is allowed to speak them? And how do language, symbols, art, activism, and performance find ways to speak back, push back, and offer critique? Theorizing, historicizing, and addressing the violence of words and words of violence, religion emerges as critical theory and embodies the very practice of critique.

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