Religion: The Cause of All Violence?

Please forgive me for this long introduction, but I wanted to mention how I came across this article.

Just the other day, I read an article that Dr. Marranci recently posted on his blog titled From the Taliban to the Taliban: the case of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh. In replying to a comment posted by “neoneo” in the comments section, Dr. Marranci referred him to a book titled Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity by an anthropologist named Talal Asad (looks to be an interesting book, by the way). I decided to do a bit of searching on the author, who I’ve never heard of before, and found his biography on Wikipedia.

Anyhow, after skimming through the biography (which mentioned some pretty interesting things, I might add) I asked a friend of mine who knows a bit about Western academic personalities if he’s ever heard of Asad, to which he answered no. As we were talking though, I mentioned some of the names mentioned in the “Interlocutors” section of his Wikipedia biography and came across the name Charles Taylor. This was a name that my friend was familiar with. Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal who was Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University for many years. My friend mentioned that one of his Islamic Studies professors at uni told his class of a book that Taylor had written in which he argues against the common perception that religions are the cause of all violence in the world.

I did a bit of searching on the net for info about this book and found the following article and audio lecture. Both are pretty interesting and I thought I’d share them both with you here.