Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity Studies in Theology and Religion edited on behalf of the netherlands school for advanced studies in theology and religion (noster) Editor in Chief Jan Willem van Henten (University of Amsterdam) Associate Editors Herman Beck (Tilburg University) Kees van der Kooi (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Daniela Müller (Radboud University Nijmegen) Advisory Board David Ford (Cambridge) – Ruard Ganzevoort (Amsterdam) Maaike de Haardt (Tilburg) – Ab de Jong (Leiden) – Anne-Marie Korte (Utrecht) Peter Nissen (Nijmegen) – Jeremy Punt (Stellenbosch) Volume 22 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/star Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity From Nationalism and Nonviolence to Health Care and Harry Potter Edited by Joachim Duyndam, Anne-Marie Korte and Marcel Poorthuis LEIDEN | BOSTON This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. 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Contents List of Contributors IX Introduction Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity 3 Joachim Duyndam, Anne-Marie Korte and Marcel Poorthuis Part 1 Sacrifice and Community The Kapsiki Home Sacrifice 17 Walter E. A. van Beek Pro Patria Mori: Sacrificing Life in Service of the Political Community 33 Theo W. A. de Wit Self-Sacrifice and the Other(s): Reflections on Andrei Tarkovksy’s The Sacrifice 54 Frederiek Depoortere “Das Opferthier, das nicht vergebens fällt”: The Meaning of Sacrifice in Friedrich Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles 71 Rebecca Prevoo and Joachim Duyndam The Nonviolent Sacrifice: The Role of Tapasya in Nonviolence 89 Saskia L. E. van Goelst Meijer Part 2 Sacrifice and Ritual Through Fire: Creative Aspects of Sacrificial Rituals in the Vedic-Hindu Continuum 109 Albertina Nugteren vi CONTENTS Sacrifice in Early Christianity: The Social Dimensions of a Metaphor 132 Gerard Rouwhorst Ritual Slaughter, Religious Plurality and the Secularization of Dutch Society (1919–2011) 147 Bart Wallet Towards a Grown-Up Faith: Love as the Basis for Harry Potter’s Self-Sacrifice 164 Sigrid Coenradie Sacrificial Scripts, Blood Values and Gender in the Twilight Vampire Narrative 181 Grietje Dresen Sacrificing Judith 201 Anne-Mareike Wetter Part 3 Sacrifice and Identity Sacrifice and Islamic Identity 221 Abdelilah Ljamai Sacrifice – Action within a Relationship: A Phenomenology of Sacrifice 230 Claudia Mariéle Wulf Self-Sacrifice between Constraint and Redemption: Gertrud von Le Fort’s The Song at the Scaffold 241 Marcel J. H. M. Poorthuis Religion, Suffering and Female Heroism: Transformations in the Meaning of Sacrifice in a Catholic Conversion Movement 255 Marjet Derks Self-Sacrifice and Care Ethics 270 Inge van Nistelrooij CONTENTS vii Animal Substitution as a Reversed Sacrifice: An Intertextual Reading of Genesis 22 and the Animal Stories of Shūsaku Endō 288 Sigrid Coenradie The Fruits of Dissent and the Operationalization of Faith: A Midrashic Reading of the Akedah 308 Elliot Lyons Epilogue Fascination of Sacrifice 327 Kathryn McClymond Bibliography 335 Index 357 List of Contributors Sigrid Coenradie Department of Religious Studies and Theology, Utrecht University Marjet Derks Faculty of Humanities, History Department, Radboud University, Nijmegen Theo W. A. de Wit Department of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, Tilburg School of Theology Frederiek Depoortere Research Unit Pastoral and Empirical Theology, Catholic University of Leuven Grietje Dresen Institute for Gender Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen Joachim Duyndam University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht Abdelilah Ljamai University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht Elliot Lyons Independent scholar Kathryn McClymond Georgia State University Albertina Nugteren Faculty of Humanities, Tilburg University Marcel J. H. M. Poorthuis Department of Biblical Science and Church History, Tilburg School of Theology Rebecca Prevoo Independent Scholar x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Gerard Rouwhorst Department of Biblical Science and Church History, Tilburg School of Theology Walter E. A. van Beek Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University Saskia L. E. van Goelst Meijer University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht Inge van Nistelrooij Care Ethics and Policy, University of Humanistic Studies Bart Wallet Faculty of Humanities, Free University, Amsterdam Anne-Mareike Wetter Netherlands Bible Society, Haarlem Claudia Mariéle Wulf Department of Moral Theology and Christian Ethics, Tilburg School of Theology Introduction ∵ Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity Joachim Duyndam, Anne-Marie Korte and Marcel Poorthuis Sacrifice, Opfer, Yajna – the various terms for sacrifice that can be found across different religious traditions show the many aspects that are perceived as constituting its core business, such as making holy, gift-giving, exchange, or the loss of something valuable. Since the mid 19th century, scholars studying written or performed sacrificial acts have tried to capture its essence with concepts such as bribery (Edward Burnett Tylor), a gift to the gods (Marcel Mauss), an act of consensual violence (René Girard), or a matter of cooking (Charles Malamoud). The act of offering sacrifices is undoubtedly one of the most universal religious phenomena. From time immemorial, offering a sac- rifice has been considered the proper way to approach the godhead. Whether the goods to be offered were products from the harvest, the firstlings of the flock, flowers, or flour, the believers expressed their gratitude, begged for divine favours or tried to appease the godhead or the community.1 The trans- formations – or re-embodiments – of sacrifice that have taken place in many religions have included prayer, almsgiving, fasting, continence, and even mar- tyrdom. These acts not only imply an effort to offer something of value, but often also a form of self-surrender, a surrender to the divine. However, these sacrificial religious practices, as such, seem to have lost most of their relevance and resonance in the context of modern western societies. Secularization and the decline of institutional religion have rendered them obsolete, dissolving the specific contexts and discourses that made these practices self-evident and meaningful. But is this indeed the case? In this volume, consisting of a collection of stud- ies into contemporary forms and manifestations of sacrifice, or sacrifice-like activities, it is argued that religious phenomena such as sacrifice, even when they have lost their significance as a strictly religious ritual, have persisted in manifold manifestations. Philosophers and sociologists of religion have argued that the classical secularization thesis, which states that religion declines when science makes progress, is no longer tenable for large parts of the modern world. They view, on the one hand, secularization as an intrinsic outcome 1 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press 1997), 112: “Some form of sacrifice can be found in almost all societies.” © joachim duyndam, et al., ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004335530_00� This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. 4 Duyndam, Korte and Poorthuis of, especially, Christianity,2 and point, on the other, to a nascent post-secular condition of western societies.3 Without reaching any definitive conclusions about these tendencies, the studies that follow explore the centrality of rituals of sacrifice in a variety of areas, such as politics, daily and communal life, ethics, art, and popular culture. Indeed, the subtitle of this book has been aptly chosen: among the cases that will be covered are the Harry Potter book series, the movies of the Twilight