VIDEO - Beyond Sacrifice, Rethinking Religion and Violence in America with John Pahl

In his famous Riverside Church Speech of April 1967, "Beyond Vietnam," the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified America as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." How has this changed, or not, since 1967? And how has "religion" factored into the problems of episodic and systemic violence in America? Drawing on his book Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence (NYU, 2010), Professor Jon Pahl suggests some necessary rethinking of the categories of "religion" and "violence" in American history, with an aim to move the nation in its domestic and foreign policies beyond "sacrifice." Such a move may in fact already be underway, toward what Pahl calls, in the working title of his next book, A Coming Religious Peace.