Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts

Book excerpt: Abrahamic scriptures serve as cultural pharmakon, prescribing what can act as both poison and remedy. This collection shows that their sometimes veiled but eternally powerful polemics can both destroy and build, exclude and include, and serve as the ultimate justification for cruelty or compassion. Here, scholars not only excavate these works for their formative and continuing cultural impact on communities, identities, and belief systems, they select some of the most troubling topics that global communities continue to navigate. Their analysis of both texts and their reception help explain how these texts promote norms and build collective identities. Rejecting the notion of the sacred realm as separate from the mundane realm and beyond critical challenge, this collection argues—both implicitly and sometimes transparently—for the presence of the sacred within everyday life and open to challenge. The very rituals, prayers, and traditions that are deemed sacred interweave into our cultural systems in infinite ways. Together, these authors explore the dynamic nature of everyday life and the often-brutal power of these texts over everyday meaning.