Dear Colleagues,

Religious sacrifice is mainly aimed at honouring a deity by offering them something as a sign of propitiation or worship. In this Special Issue, we intend to explore the rationality, if any, of this enterprise from viewpoints offered by religious and philosophical thought—including feminist perspectives— as well as human sciences, the theory of evolution and transhumanism, works of literature, and film studies.

Essays are invited on topics which include, but are not limited to, the following considerations:  

• In contemporary Western society, there appears to be little room for religious sacrifice. Believers seem to be inclined to focus on what they think God should do for them, especially with the aim of sparing them suffering, rather than on what they should do for God. What relationship does this have with the religious background, which in the West is mainly constituted by Christianity? Can Christianity and more generally the Bible be approached from anti-sacrificial viewpoints which have become popular since the Reformation and the Enlightenment and have been more recently supported by anthropological theories, such as Girard’s and feminist views of patriarchal religions? Or should the practice of sacrifice be understood so that it honours the divine without overlooking the human desire for happiness? And what suggestions can emerge to this end from cultural and religious contexts other than Christianity?
• Religious sacrifice should be aimed at establishing an ordered relationship with the deity. Can the same be said of the relationships among humans, which are often characterized by a need for sacrifice? Does sacrifice help us find a balance between self-interest and the sake of the social whole? And what about animals which, as investigations in socio-biology and evolutionary ethics argue, show similar needs? Can these sciences as well as political, sociological, psychological and psychoanalytic views lead us to offer an argument for the rationality of sacrifice and so, ultimately, for the rationality of religious sacrifice?
• Are there forms of sacrifice that may appear irremediably irrational? How can we consider the sacrifice of animals or self-sacrifice, especially when the latter is connected to unacceptable violence such as terrorism? Are there viewpoints, both religious and nonreligious, from which arguments in support of their rationality may emerge?
• Sacrifice has been seen as a time-invariant property of human culture and at the same time as just a segment of an evolutionary trajectory whose end may be the abolition of sacrifice. Is the latter view appropriately supported by evolutionary perspectives as well as by the advent of digital transformation and the cultivation of a transhumanistic perspective, given the fact that transhumanism aims at overcoming all forms of human suffering and limitation?

Prof. Dr. Roberto Di Ceglie
Guest Editor

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• theology and philosophy
• feminist perspectives
• theory of evolution and transhumanism
• literature and film studies
• sacrifice and suffering
• René Girard
• socio-biology and evolutionary ethics
• self-sacrifice and violence
• human sciences