This book offers a feminist analysis of military sacrifice and reveals the importance of a gender perspective in understanding the idea of honourable death. In present-day security discourses, traditional masculinised obligations to die for the homeland and its women and children are challenged and renegotiated. Working from a critical feminist perspective, this book examines the political and societal justifications for sacrifice in wars motivated by human rights and an international responsibility to protect. With original empirical research from six European countries, the volume demonstrates how gendered and nationalistic representations saturate contemporary notions of sacrifice and legitimate military violence. A key argument is that a gender perspective is necessary in order to understand, and to oppose, the idea of the honourable military death. Bringing together a wide range of materials – including public debates, rituals, monuments and artwork – to analyse the justifications for soldiers’ deaths in the Afghanistan war (2002–14), the analysis challenges methodological nationalism. The authors develop a feminist comparative methodology and engage in cross-country and transdisciplinary analysis. This innovative approach generates new understandings of the ways in which both the idealisation and the political contestation of military violence depend on gendered national narratives. This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, critical military studies, security studies and International Relations.

This book presents revised papers delivered at the 1998 and 1999 Taubes Minerva Center for Religious Anthropology conferences. The papers from the 1998 conference discuss the role of sacrifice in religious experience from a comparative perspective. Those from the second conference examine alternatives to sacrifice. The first theme has been much elaborated in recent scholarship, and the essays here participate in that on-going inquiry. The second theme has been less explored, and the goal of this volume is to stimulate examination of the topic by offering a set of test cases. In both sections of the volume a wide variety of religious traditions are considered. The essays show that in spite of the inclination we may sometimes have to consider sacrifice part of the idolatrous past, long overcome, it remains a persistent and meaningful part of religious experience.

A women's thriller about the search for the ancient lost origins of honor killing and the divine feminine in the Arab world.

In this new edition of the classic book on the moral conduct of war, Sidney Axinn provides a full-length treatment of the military conventions from a philosophical point of view. Axinn considers these basic ethical questions within the context of the laws of warfare: Should a good soldier ever disobey a direct military order? Are there restrictions on how we fight a war? What is meant by “military honor,” and does it really affect the contemporary soldier? Is human dignity possible under battlefield conditions? Axinn answers “yes” to these questions. His objective in A Moral Military is to establish a basic framework for moral military action and to assist in analyzing military professional ethics. He argues for the seriousness of the concept of military honor but limits honorable military activity by a strict interpretation of the notion of war crime. With revisions and expansions throughout, including a new chapter on torture, A Moral Military is an essential guide on the nature of war during a time when the limits of acceptable behavior are being stretched in new directions.

It also includes a preface that contributes important contextual information on personnel organization and losses of the Soviet Army, essays containing extensive bibliographies, and a foreword by John Erickson, the foremost Western historian of the Soviet armed forces." "This unique research tool greatly increases our understanding of the Soviet Union's mighty World War II effort and related Stalinist politics during its greatest hour. Based on the latest declassified sources, Parrish combines into one volume crucial information that has been widely scattered among many different locations and difficult to access."--Jacket.

Theory -- What Is Magic? -- The Evolution of Magic -- The Gods -- The Elements of Magic -- Initiation and Adepthood -- Types of Magic: White versus Black -- Techniques of Magic -- The Four Elements -- The Kabbalah and Its Magical Correspondences -- The Astral Plane -- Ceremonial Magic -- The Sacred and the Profane Books of Magic -- Talismanic Magic -- The Spirit of Sacrifice -- Possession and Exorcism -- Prophets and Magicians -- Witchcraft and Demonology -- Divination -- Practice -- Rituals and Spells -- Fertility Rituals -- Weather Control -- The Rites for Power: Pagans, Witches, Satanists -- The Rites of the Persians and Babylonians -- The Rites of the Egyptians -- The Rites of the Jews -- The Rites of the Arabs -- The Rites of the Greeks and Romans -- The Rites of India -- The Rites of China and Japan -- The Rites of Africa -- The Rites of Australia -- The Rites of Europe -- The Rites of Haiti and Latin America -- The Rites of Mexico and North America -- Magical Spells -- Spells for Love -- Spells for Wealth and Success -- Spells to Overcome Enemies -- Spells for Health and Protection.

Animal sacrifice has been critical to the study of ancient Mediterranean religions since the 18th century. Two leading views on sacrifice have dominated the subject: the psychological approach of Walter Burkert and the sociological one by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne. These two perspectives have argued that the main feature of sacrifice is allaying feelings of guilt at the slaughter of sacrificial animals. Naiden redresses the omission of these salient features to show that animal sacrifice is an attempt to make contact with a divine being, and that it is so important for the worshippers that it becomes subject to regulations of unequaled extent and complexity.

Why did human beings first begin to write history? Lisa Irene Hau argues that a driving force among Greek historians was the desire to use the past to teach lessons about the present and for the future. She uncovers the moral messages of the ancient Greek writers of history and the techniques they used to bring them across. Hau also shows how moral didacticism was an integral part of the writing of history from its inception in the 5th century BC, how it developed over the next 500 years in parallel with the development of historiography as a genre and how the moral messages on display remained surprisingly stable across this period. For the ancient Greek historiographers, moral didacticism was a way of making sense of the past and making it relevant to the present; but this does not mean that they falsified events: truth and morality were compatible and synergistic ends.