Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2014: Does religion lead to violence? This is the question that Karen Armstrong, the erudite former nun, asks in Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Her answer is no or more specifically, that religion is not itself a source of violence and the problem lies more deeply in our human nature and the nature of the state. To prove her point, she covers roughly five thousand years of religious history, from Gilgamesh to the present day. Along the way, she builds the case against those who state, often without much context, that religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history. This is both an apologia and a wide-ranging and very readable lesson in the history of religion. It may not completely change the mind of everyone who reads it; but like everything Armstrong writes, it will leave them more enriched. Chris Schluep