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Executions and sacrifices
This book offers age-appropriate insight into some of history's mysterious and gruesome practices -- from the walls of the Shaanxi Province in China to the murky red waters of Ireland's peat bogs.
Book
On sacrifice
The idea and practice of sacrifice play a profound role in religion, ethics, and politics. In this brief book, philosopher Moshe Halbertal explores the meaning and implications of sacrifice, developing a theory of sacrifice as an offering and examining the relationship between sacrifice, ritual, violence, and love. On Sacrifice also looks at the place of self-sacrifice within ethical life and at the complex role of sacrifice as both a noble and destructive political ideal. In the religious domain, Halbertal argues, sacrifice is an offering, a gift given in the context of a hierarchical relationship. As such it is vulnerable to rejection, a trauma at the root of both ritual and violence. An offering is also an ambiguous gesture torn between a genuine expression of gratitude and love and an instrument of exchange, a tension that haunts the practice of sacrifice. In the moral and political domains, sacrifice is tied to the idea of self-transcendence, in which an individual sacrifices his or her self-interest for the sake of higher values and commitments. While self-sacrifice has great potential moral value, it can also be used to justify the most brutal acts. Halbertal attempts to unravel the relationship between self-sacrifice and violence, arguing that misguided self-sacrifice is far more problematic than exaggerated self-love. In his exploration of the positive and negative dimensions of self-sacrifice, Halbertal also addresses the role of past sacrifice in obligating future generations and in creating a bond for political associations, and considers the function of the modern state as a sacrificial community.
eBook
Ready. Reset. Rejuvenate: Prioritizing Wellness for a Successful Semester
I am honored to serve as the 2025–26 President of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). As we begin this new academic semester, I am reminded that August and September carry a natural energy of renewal. Whether you work in an academic, public, special, or other information setting, this is a time to set intentions for the months ahead. The COVID-19 pandemic challenged many of us to reconsider our relationship with work and the sacrifices we are willing to make for our jobs. For me, it raised a critical question: What sacrifices am I willing to make for my job, and at what cost?
Journal Article
COVID-19 and the Sacrificial International Order
This essay uses COVID-19 to illuminate the sacrificial practices of the liberal international order as woven through the concepts of humanitarian governance, moral economy, triage, and sacrifice. The concept of a sacrificial international order calls attention to how all international orders have their share of sacrifices—and this includes liberal international orders. International orders can be distinguished by the selection mechanisms used to identify the sacrifices and the meanings attached to them. I call attention to how liberal international orders often rely on markets as a selection mechanism and interpret these deaths as part of progress. Following critical contributions to the study of neoliberalism that show how markets shape the ethics of “giving life” and “letting die,” I illuminate these processes through four concepts: humanitarian governance and the claim that the highest moral principle is saving lives and relieving suffering; moral economy that regulates who has access to basic subsistence goods during periods of crisis; triage, which considers how to prioritize whose lives are valued; and whether all deaths count as sacrifices or whether they are better understood as “those who can be killed.” I conclude by discussing how COVID-19 conjures hierarchies of humanity ignored by the liberal international order and challenges the discipline to consider the sacrifices in world order.
Journal Article
Glory and Agony
Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting \"primal scene\" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice.
Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female-Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus.Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.
eBook
Managing the work-home interface by making sacrifices: Costs of sacrificing psychological needs
Research has suggested that sacrifices are made to manage the work-home interface. They have been however, related to various deleterious effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we argue that the sacrifice of psychological needs is worse than the sacrifice of activities such as maintenance and leisure in terms of personal functioning. The present two studies investigate whether sacrifices made in one life sphere to attend matters in another are negatively related to well-being and satisfaction, through enhanced work-family conflict, and whether all sacrifices are created equal. One transversal (n = 141) and one three-wave prospective (n = 78) study were conducted among convenience samples of workers who answered online surveys. Results revealed that personal psychological need sacrifices were negatively related to well-being via family to work conflict (FWC) and work to family conflict (WFC), over and beyond other types of sacrifice. In addition, personal psychological need sacrifices led to decreased life and professional satisfaction over 3 months, via FWC and WFC. Hence, need sacrifices, especially those made in the personal sphere, come at a cost and may not be the best long-term strategy to manage one’s work-home interface.
Journal Article
Empire of Sacrifice
pIt is widely recognized that American culture is both exceptionally religious and exceptionally violent. Americans participate in religious communities in high numbers, yet American citizens also own guns at rates far beyond those of citizens in other industrialized nations. Since 9/11, United States scholars have understandably discussed religious violence in terms of terrorist acts, a focus that follows United States policy. Yet, according to Jon Pahl, to identify religious violence only with terrorism fails to address the long history of American violence rooted in religion throughout the country's history. In essence, Americans have found ways to consider blessed some very brutal attitudes and behaviors both domestically and globally. In strongEmpire of Sacrifice/strong, Pahl explains how both of these distinctive features of American culture work together by exploring how constructions along the lines of age, race, and gender have operated to centralize cultural power across American civil or cultural religions in ways that don't always appear to be \"religious\" at all. Pahl traces the development of these forms of systemic violence throughout American history, using evidence from popular culture, including movies such as Rebel without a Cause and Reefer Madness and works of literature such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Handmaid's Tale, to illuminate historical events. Throughout, Pahl focuses an intense light on the complex and durable interactions between religion and violence in American history, from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush's Baghdad./p
eBook
UNIFORM PRICING IN U.S. RETAIL CHAINS
We show that most U.S. food, drugstore, and mass-merchandise chains charge nearly uniform prices across stores, despite wide variation in consumer demographics and competition. Demand estimates reveal substantial within-chain variation in price elasticities and suggest that the median chain sacrifices $16 million of annual profit relative to a benchmark of optimal prices. In contrast, differences in average prices between chains are broadly consistent with the optimal benchmark. We discuss a range of explanations for nearly uniform pricing, highlighting managerial inertia and brand image concerns as mechanisms frequently mentioned by industry participants. Relative to our optimal benchmark, uniform pricing may significantly increase the prices paid by poorer households relative to the rich, dampen the response of prices to local economic shocks, alter the analysis of mergers in antitrust, and shift the incidence of intranational trade costs.
Journal Article
Understanding sacrifice: a reader
This volume provides a thorough introduction to the major classic and modern writings dealing with religious sacrifice. Collected here are twenty five influential selections, each with a brief introduction addressing the overall framework and assumptions of its author. As they present different theories and examples of sacrifice, these selections also discuss important concepts in religious studies such as the origin of religion, totemism, magic, symbolism, violence, structuralism and ritual performance. Students of comparative religion, ritual studies, the history of religions, the anthropology of religion and theories of religion will particularly value the historical organization and thematic analyses presented in this collection.
eBook