As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do every… - Karen Armstrong

Moses explained, “the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.”1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community.2

When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.

One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state.