Primo Levi The Elements of a Life

Ian G. Baird (Author)

Champassak Royalty and Sovereignty: Within and Between Nation-States in Mainland Southeast Asia

The Kingdom of Champassak was founded in 1713 in what is now southern Laos, and its royal lineage, t

Tony Spawforth (Author)

What the Greeks Did for Us

An enjoyable, accessible exploration of the legacy of ancient Greece today, across our daily live

Thomas Albert Howard (Author)

Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History

9,A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century. Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment--passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism--Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting ...