June 29, 2009

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Jeremy Craig, 404-413-1357
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Religious sacrifice goes beyond violence, GSU professor says in award-winning book 

ATLANTA — When religious sacrifice is mentioned, the concept can conjure images of blood and death in the minds of people living in Western cultures. But religious sacrifice is far more complex in world religious traditions, as Georgia State University’s Kathryn McClymond explains in a new award-winning book.

In Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice, McClymond, associate professor and chair of the Georgia State Department of Religious Studies, explores religious sacrifice in both the Jewish tradition and the Vedic tradition, which was the predecessor of Hinduism.

In her book, which this month won the 2009 Georgia Author of the Year Award for the best creative nonfiction essay, McClymond explains that sacrifice rituals can involve the ordinary and have different meanings.

“There's much activity that involves plant and liquid substances, and not the animals we think about” McClymond explained. “It’s not nearly as dramatic. But when you get past this, it becomes much more interesting, because these are much more complicated ritual activities than just killing.”

The role of sacrifice depends on the tradition, she said. In the Christian tradition, atonement — such as the crucifixion of Jesus — is prominent.

“In the Jewish tradition, that's a piece of it, but there are also layers of purification,” she said. “In the Vedic tradition, it has more to do with sustaining the cosmos. It has very little to do with you, personally, but much more to do with keeping the universe going.”

For her research, McClymond studied the texts of the ancient Jewish Mishnah and the Hindu Shrauta Sutras — both texts which are incredibly rich with multiple layers, and outline ritual practice. Her research also took her to India to work with a Vedic priest.

"I watched him perform a very basic sacrifice, and it was on the second floor of his house," she said. "We went in his living room and had tea, and the next thing I know, I went upstairs and I saw a whole sacrificial area laid out.

The priest lit a fire, and smoke filled the room, she said. This, she explained, was something he did on a regular basis to keep the universe going. There was no high dramatic moment.

“We tend to think of sacrifice as special, and exotic,” she said. “And here, this was something being done in the upstairs of his house, and it was part of a regular routine.”

The concept of sacrifice goes beyond religion. One modern reading on sacrifice is that it means that someone must give up something of value. When McClymond was writing the book, she said she listened to such rhetoric made in the run-up to the Iraq War, and it was striking.

“A lot of the language being used as a country to describe what was being done, not only in sending soldiers overseas, but in what their families were doing back home, involved the concept of sacrifice,” she said. “In some cases, that included death and violence, but in a lot of other cases, that included giving something up.”

The book is published by The Johns Hopkins University Press.