Too often, people respond to a serious concern with a ritual that allows them to maintain the comfort of the status quo. Thats what Roger Bourke White Jr. calls a goat sacrifice its a tradeoff that doesnt do what it is intended to do: solve the problem. These sacrifices make people and communities feel less guilty and fearful, but do nothing to end the serious problems. Examples of modern goat sacrificing include searching all air passengers so well feel safe, striving to protect our children so much they cant play outside, and criminalizing large segments of the population for drug-related activities so we feel like were fighting drug abuse. These solutions cost huge amounts of money and attention, but they do nothing to solve problems. Even worse, they include unseen costs beyond the obvious goat that distracts us from finding true, lasting solutions. Its important to study why goat sacrifices occur, how to identify when were wasting money, so we can instead spend those dollars well. We can do all of those things by getting smart about good intentions and recognizing Goat Sacrificing in the 21st Century.

A study of animal sacrifice within Greek paganism, Judaism, and Christianity between 100 BC and AD 200. After a vivid account of the realities of sacrifice in the Greek East and in the Jerusalem Temple, Maria-Zoe Petropoulou explores the attitudes of early Christians towards this practice, and the reasons why they ultimately rejected it.

Sacrifice is a well known form of ritual in many world religions. Although the actual practice of animal sacrifice was largely abolished in the later history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it is still recalled through biblical stories, the ritual calendar and community events. The essays in this volume discuss the various positions regarding the value of sacrifice in a wide variety of disciplines such as history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, art and gender and post-colonial studies. In this context they examine a wide array of questions pertaining to the 'actuality of sacrifice' in various social, historical and intellectual contexts ranging from the pre-historical to the post-Holocaust, and present new understandings of some of the most sensitive topics of our time.

Leading specialists in theology, anthropology, religious studies and history elucidate the modern debate about sacrifice from interest shown in the sixteenth century through to the present day. Individual chapters discuss anthropological theories, theological controversies, philosophical interpretations, and literary uses of sacrifice.

This volume brings together studies on Greek animal sacrifice by foremost experts in Greek language, literature and material culture. Readers will benefit from the synthesis of new evidence and approaches with a re-evaluation of twentieth-century theories on sacrifice. The chapters range across the whole of antiquity and go beyond the Greek world to consider possible influences in Hittite Anatolia and Egypt, while an introduction to the burgeoning science of osteo-archaeology is provided. The twentieth-century emphasis on sacrifice as part of the Classical Greek polis system is challenged through consideration of various ancient perspectives on sacrifice as distinct from specific political or even Greek contexts. Many previously unexplored topics are covered, particularly the type of animals sacrificed and the spectrum of sacrificial ritual, from libations to lasting memorials of the ritual in art.

The principle of sacrifice is as old as human life itself. This book provides an overview of sacrificial practices around the world since prehistoric times. It also examines the reasons behind these rituals, and in the case of human sacrifice an attempt is made to understand the mentality of the 'victims' who often willingly went to their deaths.

Sacrifice dominated the religious landscape of the ancient Mediterranean world for millennia, but its role and meaning changed dramatically in the fourth and fifth centuries with the rise of Christianity. Daniel Ullucci offers a new explanation of this remarkable transformation, in the process demonstrating the complexity of the concept of sacrifice in Roman, Greek, and Jewish religion. The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice challenges the predominant scholarly model, which posits a connection between so-called critiques of sacrifice in non-Christian Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts and the Christian rejection of animal sacrifice. According to this model, pre-Christian authors attacked the propriety of animal sacrifice as a religious practice, and Christians responded by replacing animal sacrifice with a pure, ''spiritual'' 'worship. This historical construction influences prevailing views of animal sacrifice even today, casting it as barbaric, backward, and primitive despite the fact that it is still practiced in such contemporary religions as Islam and Santeria. Rather than interpret the entire history of animal sacrifice through the lens of the Christian master narrative, Ullucci shows that the ancient texts must be seen not simply as critiques but as part of an ongoing competition between elite cultural producers to define the meaning and purpose of sacrifice. He reveals that Christian authors were not merely purveyors of pure spiritual religion, but a cultural elite vying for legitimacy and influence in societies that long predated them. The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice is a crucial reinterpretation of the history of one of humanity's oldest and most fascinating rituals.

"This book explores the changing socio-economic, political, and cultural significance of animal sacrifice in the Roman imperial period. Although animal sacrifice was only one of a wide range of offerings to the gods, it was distinctive in being more costly than many others and in generating a valuable consumer good, high-quality meat. As a result, it functioned to reinforce social structures that enabled the smooth operation of the Roman empire: the socio-economic hierarchies of Graeco-Roman cities, the normative Graeco-Roman culture that bound together urban elites, and the ideological role of the Roman emperor (Part I). At the same time as the practice of animal sacrifice performed these ideological functions, there were also, from an early date, various discourses about animal sacrifice that relocated its meaning from the social to the conceptual sphere, discourses that a range of free-lance experts, from Graeco-Roman philosophers to early Christian leaders, deployed as a means of establishing their own social power (Part II). These two aspects of animal sacrifice, as practice and as discourse, intersected both with each other and with larger economic and political developments in ways that, starting in the mid-3rd century CE, led to its becoming the object of both imperial and ecclesiastical policy. Over the course of the 4th century CE, animal sacrifice was displaced from its central role in the structuring of the empire, redefined as a marker of 'paganism', and eventually prohibited altogether (Part III)"--

A study of animal sacrifice within Greek paganism, Judaism, and Christianity during the period of their interaction between about 100 BC and AD 200. After a vivid account of the realities of sacrifice in the Greek East and in the Jerusalem Temple (up to AD 70), Maria-Zoe Petropoulou explores the attitudes of early Christians towards this practice. Contrary to other studies in this area, she demonstrates that the process by which Christianity finally separated its own cultic code from the strong tradition of animal sacrifice was a slow and difficult one. Petropoulou places special emphasis on the fact that Christians gave completely new meanings to the term `sacrifice'. She also explores the question why, if animal sacrifice was of prime importance in the eastern Mediterranean at this time, Christians should ultimately have rejected it.

The first general critique of the interpretations of animal sacrifice established by Walter Burkert, the late J.-P. Vernant, and Marcel Detienne.