The touchstone -- The fate of law -- Divine violence as the relief of law -- The higher law -- The politics of pardon -- Not yet the end
Summary
Conventional wisdom holds that attempts to combine religion and politics will produce unlimited violence. Concepts such as jihad, crusade, and sacrifice need to be rooted out, the story goes, for the sake of more bounded and secular understandings of violence. Ted Smith upends this dominant view, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and others to trace the ways that seemingly secular politics produce their own forms of violence without limit. He brings this argument to life-and digs deep into the American political imagination-through a string of surprising reflections on John Brown, t
