Leading specialists in theology, anthropology, religious studies and history elucidate the modern debate about sacrifice from interest shown in the sixteenth century through to the present day. Individual chapters discuss anthropological theories, theological controversies, philosophical interpretations, and literary uses of sacrifice.

• Introduction


• 1: Johannes Zachhuber: Modern Discourse on Sacrifice and its Theological Background


• 2: Pamela S. Anderson: Sacrifice as self-destructive love : why autonomy should still matter to feminists


• 3: Paul S. Fiddes: Sacrifice, Atonement and Renewal: Intersections between Girard, Kristeva and von Balthasar


• 4: Julia Meszaros: Sacrifice and the self


• 5: Wolfgang Palaver: Sacrificial Cults as the Mysterious Centre of Every Religion : A Girardian Assessment of Aby Warburg s Theory of Religion


• 6: Jessica Frazier: From Slaughtered Lambs to Dedicated Lives: Sacrifice as Value-Bestowal


• 7: Gavin Flood: Sacrifice as Refusal


• 8: Philip McCosker: Sacrifice in Recent Roman Catholic Thought: From Paradox to Polarity, and Back Againa


• 9: Nick Allen: Using Hubert and Mauss to think about sacrifice


• 10: Laura Rival: The Aztec Sacrificial Complex


• 11: David Brown: Human Sacrifice and Two Imaginative Worlds, Aztec and Christian. Finding God in Evil


• 12: Bettina E. Schmidt: Blood Sacrifice as a Symbol of the Paradigmatic Other: The debate about ebó-rituals in the Americas


• 13: Jon Pahl: Apocalypse and Sacrifice in Modern Film: American Exceptionalism and a Scandinavian Alternative


• 14: Derek Hughes: Human Sacrifice and the Literary Imagination