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Most academic efforts to understand morality and ideology come from theorists who limit the domain of morality to issues related to harm and fairness. For such theorists, conservative beliefs are puzzles requiring nonmoral explanations. In contrast, this chapter presents moral foundations theory, which broadens the moral domain to match the anthropological literature on morality. The theory is extended by integrating it with a review of the sociological constructs of community, authority, and sacredness, as formulated by Emile Durkheim and others. Data are presented to support the theory, which also show that liberals misunderstand the explicit moral concerns of conservatives more than conservatives misunderstand liberals. The chapter suggests that what liberals see as a nonmoral motivation for system justification may be better described as a moral motivation to protect society, groups, and the structures and constraints that are often (although not always) beneficial for individuals. Also outlined are the possible benefits of a moral foundations perspective for system justification theory, including better understandings of (a) why the system justifying motive is palliative despite some harmful effects, (b) possible evolutionary origins of the motive, and (c) the values and worldviews of conservatives in general.

One solution to the current environmental crisis is to resacralize nature, not by man who has no power to bestow the quality of sacredness upon anything, but through the remembrance of what nature is as theater of Divine Creativity and Presence. Nature has been already sacralized by the Sacred Itself, and its resacralization means more than anything else a transformation within man, who has himself lost his Sacred Center, so as to be able to rediscover the Sacred and consequently to behold again nature's sacred quality. And this remembrance and rediscovery can only be achieved through religion in its traditional forms as the repositories of the Sacred and the means of access to it. Furthermore, such a transformation can only come about through the revival of religious knowledge of the order of nature, which itself means the undoing of the negative effects of all those processes of transformation of man's image of himself, his thought, and the world about him that have characterized the history of the West during the past five centuries.

This chapter argues that biblical revelation served as the most important source, at least in European civilization, for the still critically important moral claim that each human life carries profound worth, and the related moral-legal demand that each human being’s dignity must be respected. In Christian theo-ethical terms, this means that the real issue is ‘the God-declared sacredness of each human life with correlated moral obligations’ rather than merely ‘human dignity’. The chapter enters into the biblical materials to present in their own distinctive ways central elements that gave birth to a sacredness-of-life norm and continue to fund that norm today. I reserve a few comments at the end of the chapter to discuss how and why ‘sacredness of human life’ became ‘human dignity’, and what was lost (and perhaps gained) when that transition occurred in the modern period.

If, as Herodotus stated, Egypt is the gift of the Nile, then it is a gift delivered largely by donkeys. Donkeys appear in the archaeological record of Egypt earlier than anywhere else. For over 6,000 years they have sustained some of the densest human populations on the planet, as well as supporting the development of one of the world’s first civilizations. Along the river, they have moved people, carried goods to market, threshed grain, and ploughed fields. They have been essential for extracting valuable metals and precious stones from the surrounding deserts and crucial for connecting Egypt with its neighbours. This chapter looks at all these themes. Additionally, it explores the symbolic significance that donkeys acquired in Egyptian thought, before considering their spread beyond the Nile into other parts of Africa. Faunal remains identified as donkey, rather than wild ass, are known from several sites of the Predynastic period that preceded Egypt’s development as a single state by about 3100 BC. During this period Egyptian society changed from being a series of small agricultural villages to a situation in which some of those settlements expanded into early towns, some of them seats of evermore competitive chieftains, others centres of craft production that were becoming heavily engaged in long-distance trade. This last point holds particularly true for several sites close to modern Cairo. It is from some of these, as we have seen, that the earliest donkey remains have been recovered: at El Omari c.4600–4400 BC and Maadi c.4000–3500 BC. A little later, one of the many carved slate ceremonial palettes produced during the later fourth millennium BC, the so- called Libyan (or Cities) Palette, shows a line of tame-looking donkeys between a row of cattle above and one of sheep below: though pictured with the dark shoulder stripe characteristic of wild asses, and without harness or loads, their context and demeanour suggest that they are domesticated. The kings of Egypt’s First and Second Dynasties (c.3085–2686 BC) reinforced their status by building monumental tomb complexes at Abydos in Upper Egypt and Saqqara outside Memphis, their new administrative and ceremonial centre just south of the apex of the Nile Delta.

The donkey was domesticated from the African wild ass in Northeast Africa some 7–6,000 years ago. This chapter looks at what happened when donkeys turned right and exited Africa into Asia. Though tracking their movement as far as India and China, its principal focus lies in the Ancient Near East, the region stretching from Israel north to Turkey and eastward into Iraq and Iran that is often termed the ‘Fertile Crescent’. Within this vast area, donkeys were used in daily life, including the agricultural cycle, just as they were in Egypt. But like there they also acquired other, more specialized uses and associations. Thus, after tracing the donkey’s spread I look at its role in three key aspects of the Near East’s earliest civilizations: the organization of trade; the legitimization of kingship; and religion. By 3500 BC the earliest cities had already emerged in Mesopotamia, the ‘land between the rivers’ Euphrates and Tigris. Over the course of the next 1,500 years, urbanization gathered pace across Palestine and Syria in the west, northward in Turkey, and east through Iran. Within Mesopotamia the independent Sumerian city-states of the south developed increasingly monarchical forms of government, seeing brief unity under the kings of Akkad and the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late third millennium BC. Then and later a city-state pattern of political organization also held in northern Mesopotamia (for example, at Aššur and its neighbour Mari) and in the Levant. In the mid-second millennium bc, however, much larger kingdoms emerged: the Hittites in central Turkey, Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, and Babylonia in its south. The Hittites, in particular, competed with Egypt for control of Syrian and Palestinian cities like Ugarit. When these Bronze Age powers collapsed around 1200 BC, their disappearance opened a window for smaller states like Israel to flourish briefly in their wake. Subsequently, however, first Assyria (911–612 BC) and then Babylon (612–539 BC) established much more centralized and extensive empires across the Near East before being subsumed within the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and his successors.

This chapter suggests that a product of Christianity is the secularism of the modern world and this is indeed a religious phenomenon. The chapter describes that there is a universal sacredness in our life, as Christian humanists continues to establish the great doctrines and use symbols meant to be true of every human being. It cites that just a few people made a glimpse of nihilism and the chapter also states that nihilism represents a great event that made a mark in religion. Also the chapter explains that there is sacredness between Christian art and Christian vocabulary because religious art can now be defined. Through this art, religion became a human function and a mode of human awareness.

This chapter examines material religion in Seoul and Hanoi by focusing on the production and circulation of sacred goods and services in the two Asian cities. In particular, it considers how notions of sacredness, magic, and efficacy are expressed and experienced in these settings through two similar but not identical domains of popular religious practice: those of spirit mediums in Hanoi and of shamans in Seoul. After a brief overview of place, the chapter considers how spirit mediums and shamans are situated within urban space and how these popular religious practices foster the production and consumption of different kinds of religious goods and services. It then explores how changes in production and distribution have been experienced and interpreted in Seoul and Hanoi by looking at the provision of services at ritual sites and the production and consumption of sacred images. It shows how the city becomes a hub of popular religious activity that is aided and abetted by brisk markets in ritual goods, and the ways in which these markets are marked by the commodification of goods and services.

Two problems arise when exploring the ideologies of secularism and fundamentalism as defined in this book in the context of the Hindu religious tradition. First, it has been asserted by historians that Hinduism is a ‘deceptive term’ and ‘difficult to define’, and that special care has to be exercised in its ‘proper use’. Second, many scholars have questioned whether the sacred–secular dichotomy of domains is at all present in the Hindu religious tradition, or present only in a sense which is different from that of the Christian perspective on the subject. This chapter examines these two problems and the sceptical attitude that underlies them. First, it discusses the unity of the sacred and the secular and then considers religious pluralism. It also carries an Appendix at the end of the chapter titled ‘The Ashokan State. The Weberian Thesis’.

This chapter takes a look at certain instances of ‘deflation’, or even ‘debasement’, in Jewish ethics. These instances cut very deep. Each pair of readings involves a contrary moral attitude; and it is imperative for us, in the normal workings of our lives, to receive guidance between them. The chapter thus questions if the view of Judaism on the subject of the place of the non-Jew in the restored Jerusalem is that indicated by the Masorah and the American Jewish version; or can we follow the Septuagint and, most explicitly, the Targum, and read the text with a sheva and not a pataḥ? Is the view Judaism on the subject of the sacredness of life that indicated by the printed text of the Mishnah, i.e., apparently, that only Jews count; or can we, with the manuscripts and early authorities and Professor Albeck's second Afterthoughts, omit the word meyisrael? These are important issues, and this chapter considers which of the contrary views one should to account as Judaism.

Although almost all Bedouin have followed Islam since early in its history, those who remained nomadic in the deserts of the Middle East found the religion barely accessible to them as an ongoing spiritual and psychological support, owing to their distance from Islamic religious instruction and institutions. For such support, they relied instead on primordial, often animistic, practices that had not changed much from the religious behavior of their pre-Islamic ancestors, and which could still be witnessed among pre-modern Bedouin down to the late 20^th century. This chapter identifies the similarities between these ancient pre-Islamic religious practices and those of the biblical Israelites, focusing specifically on their common attitudes toward sacrifice, the sacredness of blood, the role of ethics, and respect for taboos, oaths, and vows.

In a 1985 interview with Adriano Sofri, Agamben says of his encounter with Benjamin: I read him for the first time in the 1960s, in the Italian translation of the Angelus Novus edited by Renato Solmi. He immediately made the strongest impression on me: for no other author have I felt such an unsettling affinity. To me happened what Benjamin narrates about his own encounter with Aragon’s Paysan de Paris: that after a very short while he had to close the book because it made his heart thump. For Agamben, this encounter with Benjamin proved to be ‘decisive’2 and would mark his entire career, as much as meeting Heidegger in person at the end of the 1960s. Of these two first philosophical ‘masters’ he would often say, quite enigmatically, that for him the two philosophers worked ‘each one as antidote for the other’,3 or more precisely: ‘Every great work contains a shadowy and poisonous part, against which it does not provide the antidote. Benjamin has been for me this antidote, which helped me to survive Heidegger.’4 The nature of Heidegger’s poison and of Benjamin’s antidote is not very clear; what is clear, however, is that this early encounter with Benjamin shaped Agamben’s own encounter with philosophy itself, and would exert an enduring influence (perhaps ‘the single most important influence’)5 on his entire oeuvre.

This chapter is concerned with the understanding of the institution of the Church within Catholic Christianity. First, it discusses the sacredness of Church and its Catholic nature. It then describes the ways in which the Christian faith has been elaborated. Finally, the chapter lists the principles of Catholicism.

When music is experienced, and especially when it is felt as important to the subject and as beautiful, the subject's critical – descriptive and evaluative – discourse regularly uses references to imaginary spaces and to states and events taking place there, including meteorological phenomena and cosmic visions, so that critical accounts begin to resemble weather reports or poetry. We discuss some examples of this extremely common but still curious cognitive phenomenon, which pertains to the problem of musical meaning: Is mental space-building involving imagery of this kind part of the semantics of music? Can spatial imagery be dismissed as core semantic components in the content of musical experiences? – We add a semiotic dimension to the discussion by comparing the phenomenon in question to double-space perception in the experience of coded signs and language. Signs become artful when their codes are weakened; instead of functioning as performative signals, they then give rise to playful auto-referential performances, and their signified content deepens and changes into autonomous imaginary ‘worlds’ inducing feelings of sacredness. This happens in music, which in fact constitutes the main medium for those sacred, not necessarily religious but still ‘spiritual’, extra-worldly, oniric experiences that human beings enjoy in art.

This chapter introduces the main goals of the book: (1) to rectify the neglect of the secular clergy in current historiography; (2) to show just how important the secular clergy were within medieval society; (3) to explore the tensions created by the need for the secular clergy to operate beyond the cloister walls, often in deeply secular settings, in a period in which “the world” was viewed with deep suspicion. In addition, it sets out the geographic and temporal parameters of the discussion and delves into the defining characteristics of the secular clergy. What set them apart, both in broad theoretical and in more precise technical terms, from the laity and from the regular or monastic clergy? Finally, the this introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the remaining chapters.

This chapter presents the outlines of an alternative to Max Weber’s narrative of disenchantment. It does so first by setting out a theory of the dynamics of sacralization in summary form. Second, this theory is applied to the history of the fusions of this dynamic and the dynamics of power formation and the history of the tensions between the two. The guiding thread for this alternative history is the topic of collective self-sacralization and the sources of resistance to it. The chapter ends with a short reflection on the normative implications of this alternative.

This book has used narratives to argue for the critical importance of “being with” animals in a way that is based on affect, and now concludes with one more true and heartfelt story that illustrates the role of affect, narrative, sacrifice, spirituality, and sacredness in human–animal relationship. Here the chapter shares personal experience from Easter weekend 2009, when this chapter’s author and her next-door neighbor hosted “Dog Park,” opening the gate between their yards to let their dogs play together. They had done this hundreds of times before. On that particular day, however, the pack of medium- to large-size dogs attacked the author’s little old beagle, Daisy, almost killing her. Upon the advice of a trainer, she thought of having Jubilee, one of her dogs that attacked Daisy, euthanized. Instead, she decided to relinquish Daisy to be adopted again through beagle rescue so that Jubilee will live. Her story is about love for animals in all its permutations. Through that love, we can transform the world for animals.

This chapter, and the next two, considers foundational notions in value perception and construction. The chapters form a sequence, about three closely entwined components of value: identity, authority, and performance. They suggest that local modes of value may be understood in music through the performative articulation of specific processes of identity and authority negotiation. Those processes take place where sociality intersects with deeper forms of value agreement. This chapter is about Suryaniness, which it explains as a performed sense of identity in two ways: first, through the association of Suryani ethnic spirituality with Edessa (rather than Urfa) and its language; second, in relation to a sacredness in the perceived textual and melodic origins of chant. Significance in music perception and meaning construction is related here to questions of place and space, and to a process of authentication, which is the manifestation of an internally agreed sense of originality.