Religion, Empire, and Torture
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In Religion, Empire, and Torture, Bruce Lincoln identifies three core components of an imperial theology that have transhistorical and contemporary relevance: dualistic ethics, a theory of divine election, and a sense of salvific mission. He shows how these religious ideas shaped Achaemenian practice and brought the Persians unprecedented wealth, power, and territory, but also produced unmanageable contradictions, as in a gruesome case of torture discussed in the book's final chapter. Close study of that episode leads Lincoln back to the present with a postscript that provides a searing and utterly novel perspective on the photographs from Abu Ghraib.
Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Divinity at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and sits on the Commitees on the History of Culture and the Ancient Mediterranean World.