Introduction

Sacrifice, originally a religious-cultic concept, has become highly secularized and used in various instances for different social phenomena. The current issue puts forward a selection of papers that offer insights into sacrifice and self-sacrifice and focus on the process of transformation of the sacrificial individual. Three main axes put the concrete papers into a dialogue with one another: first, there is the philosophical-theological and gender reflection of the experience of the paradigmatic sacrificial story of the western tradition, i.e., the Akedah (Gen 22); second, the existential-phenomenological interpretation of self-sacrifice in the secular world which nevertheless aims to reveal a higher good – Freedom, Love, or the Good; third, the gender and feminist reflection of the motherly sacrifice of childbirth both in the religious-cultic context and in the secular context which presents childbirth both as a moment of autonomy loss and submission and a moment of women self-emancipation

Aesthetics · Autonomy · Emancipation · Epistemology · Existentialism · Individualism · Political science · Politics · Sacrifice · Secularization · Sociology · Theology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

• Homo necans

  Walter Burkert•Homo necans•1983

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• Sacrifice

  Henri Hubert•Sacrifice•1981

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• Violence and the Sacred

  Open Access•René Girard, Aisha Karim et al.•On Violence•1979

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