In War on Sacred Grounds**, Ron E. Hassner investigates the causes and properties of struggles over sites that are both venerated and contested, and proposes ways for managing these disputes.** Holy places can create the potential for clashes, not only between competing religious groups but also between religious groups and secular actors. Hassner illustrates this complex, violent dynamic through a series of case studies, including the conflict ov...

Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture, Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide.The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every c...

How does religion affect the lives of professional soldiers? How does religion shape militaries, their organization, procedures, and performance? This volume is the first to address these questions by comparing religious symbols and practices in nine countries: Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, India, the United States, and Turkey. The contributors explore how and why soldiers pray, the role of religious rituals prior to battle, the functions that chaplains perform...

The role of military chaplains has changed over the past decade as Western militaries have deployed to highly religious environments such as East Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq. U.S. military chaplains, who are by definition non-combatants, have been called upon by their war-fighting commanders to take on new roles beyond providing religious services to the troops. Chaplains are now also required to engage the local citizenry and provide their commanders with assessments of the religious an...

An intimate and personal glimpse inside the mind of the former leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, through his own words...“I believe in the kindness of others, and that I must love them without fear.”—Jorge Bergoglio, Pope FrancisJorge Bergoglio was the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit pope, and the first to take the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, the thirteenth-century friar known for his charity and kindness. He...

Since Pakistan was founded in 1947, its army has dominated the state. The military establishment has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India, with the primary aim of wresting Kashmir from it. To that end, Pakistan initiated three wars over Kashmir-in 1947, 1965, and 1999-and failed to win any of them. Today, the army continues to prosecute this dangerous policy by employing non-state actors under the security of its ever-expanding nuclear umbrella. It has sustained a proxy war...

On March 13, the cardinals of the Catholic Church, gathered to elect a successor to a living Pope for the first time in 600 years, announced a dramatic shift. By elevating Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina to become Pope Francis the 266th Pontiff, the cardinals were naming the first-ever Pope from the growing New World to take the helm of the church at a crucial moment.It was a stunning move by a 2,000-year-old institution that has immense influence—with 1.2 billion adher...

Essays on how Jews, Muslims, and Christians have coexisted—or not—over the centuries, from "a particularly incisive and trustworthy historian of religion" ( Commonweal).Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In Neighboring Faiths, David Nirenberg examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews l...

Cutting the Fuse offers a wealth of new knowledge about the origins of suicide terrorism and strategies to stop it. Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman have examined every suicide terrorist attack worldwide from 1980 to 2009, and the insights they have gleaned from that data fundamentally challenge how we understand the root causes of terrorist campaigns today—and reveal why the War on Terror has been ultimately counterproductive. Through a close analysis of suicide campaigns by A...

This volume provides a review of Israel's unprecedented and careful consideration of questions of international law when forced to go to war to defend its civilian population from attack, with a particular focus on the Gaza war of 2008-2009. It concludes that existing international law permits a nation to act in self-defense, and that Israel gives more thought to upholding the laws of war during its military operations than any other nation in history.The broad questions discussed ...

A down-to-earth and deeply intimate portrait of Pope Francis and his faith, based on interviews with the men and women who knew him simply as Jorge Mario BergoglioEarly on the evening of March 13, 2013, the newly elected Pope Francis stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and did something remarkable: Before he imparted his blessing to the crowd, he asked the crowd to bless him, then bowed low to receive this grace. In the days that followed,...

Hizbullah ('Party of God') is one of the Middle East's major political forces. Sheikh Naim Qassem, its Deputy Secretary-General, provides an insider's view of this Shi'ite resistance group turned political party, from its inception to the present day. Formed in 1982 in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, Hizbullah was instrumental in forcing Israel to withdraw its troops in 2000. During the 1990s, after many years functioning as both a guerrilla movement and a social-support provider...