Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

By Jonathan Sacks, Baron Sacks

Categories: Politics & Social Sciences, Religion & Spirituality

In Not in God's Name (2015), Rabbi Jonathan Sacks examines the roots of religiously motivated violence, including what he calls altruistic evil, killing in the name of a higher cause. Sacks rereads the stories of sibling rivalry in Genesis, among them Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his brothers, as critiques of violence rather than licences for it. He argues that Judaism, Christianity and Islam, rightly read, call for compassion toward the stranger rather than hatred.