Peter Marshall
Blessed are the Peacemakers
Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence
By Karen Armstrong
The Bodley Head 502pp £25 order from our bookshop
Religion is inherently violent, the cause of all the major wars in history. This sentiment, says Karen Armstrong in Fields of Blood, is heard constantly nowadays, ‘recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics’. In the course of a learned, lively and lengthy historical survey, Armstrong, a respected commentator on the comparative history and practice of religion and a well-known proponent of a broad and inclusive theism, aims to set the record straight.
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