Religion and Violence: An Encyclopedia of Faith and Conflict from Antiquity to the Present

摘要

In the essay on new religious movements in this encyclopaedia, as well as rightly saying that interest in them has grown in recent years, and in the context of much else on how claims of new revelation have led to more such groups, the author states that "dominant religious community sets limits on what is acceptable in terms of specific beliefs about reality, and those beliefs are used by adherents to interpret and understand their experiences". The two ideas about what is acceptable and how people interpret experience come through the many contributions in this fascinating reference work. The editor Ross (who writes on crime and works at the University of Baltimore) picks this up in his introduction when he says that "one thing is certain, and that is the impact of the so-called crisis of modernity on religion, in which a religion's inability to justify itself in the face of secular challenges has been a historically unique problem that has resulted in new forms of religious violence".