I am a little jealous of a little piece in this week's Newsweek, in their welcome and regular BeliefWatch column. Lisa Miller takes on sacrifice, following the story of a group of Texans who practice chicken sacrifice as part of their Santeria faith, and the town set against it.



This story was originally broken in the wonderful (and now defunct) religion section of the Dallas Morning News. The longer treatment nicely handled the range of the issues it presented - animal rights, religious intolerance, and my favorite, history.

• The Old Testament is rife with references to the sacrifice of rams. Jews abandoned the ritual after the temple where sacrifices were performed was destroyed. The Torah commands that sacrifices must be done in a place commanded by God, and no sacrifice can take place until a new one is designated.

• Many Muslims commemorate the end of the Hajj by sacrificing a sheep in honor of Abraham's willingness to slay his son at God's commandment and God's providing of a ram instead. The holiday, known as Eid al-Adha, was celebrated last week.

• In Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus replaced animal sacrifice under the belief that Jesus was the Lamb of God and his ultimate sacrifice redeemed the world of its sins. This sacrifice is commemorated in Mass with the sacrament of the wafer and wine.

I am just working through Walter Burkert's wonderful history of Greek Religion. He a couple of really interesting views on the power of the experience. He says that for the Greeks it was "the essence of the sacred act," the central most powerful metophors of ceremonies which experienced death as necessary for the coninuing of life.

It was far from a cold-blodded act. In fact, he says, the empathy for the animal is essential. A "domestic animal, a posession and a companion, must nevertheless be slaughtered and eaten," which creates "more conflicts and anxieties
which are resolved inthe ritual."These conflicts were mirrors of larger societal anxieties: that for a wommunity, life depends on death for food and space - after communially witnessing the animal's slaughtered, the community celebrated new life.

The tradition was of course widespread in the ancient world, practiced mong the Hittiites and of course the Semites (though it is an interesting difference that the greek gods left the best meat to mankind but semites preferred the charred "burnt offerings" which could not be eaten).

Muslims still celebrate this act and the Jews, should the Temple ever be rebuilt, will also need to sacrifice to be observant. Sacrifice is the central metaphor of Christianity. So who's worried about a few families in Texas?