Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

"This is an extraordinary book. From a religious perspective, it confronts, head-on, the responsibilities of religions for violence. The central thread is that religion can warm and religion can burn. Jonathan Sacks explains the roots of this dual identity of religion, its ability to unite, its ability to separate. He looks at the three Abrahamic faiths and tries to diagnose why they have been such a source of conflict and what can be done about it. It’s an extremely erudite book. I’m not a religious person myself, so it was an education for me, but it’s also quite inspiring. The essential answer to that question can sound prosaic—it’s to reach out. The essential story of human society is that where people build things together they form fellow feeling. And where they Balkanize, where they separate, they bring about misunderstanding and division. “It is striking that the IRC was founded by Einstein to rescue Jews from Europe and today forty percent of our work is in Muslim-majority countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan.” Today, when you think about the West, the most integrated cities are, in general, the most respectful and tolerant of difference. Proximity to people who are different doesn’t produce dissent, it actually produces ‘live and let live.’ One of the most striking parts of Sacks’s book is where he says the most challenging injunction in the Bible is not to love your neighbor, it is to love a stranger. The point is that where people live, work and play together they understand each other and they respect each other."