Violence and the sacred : Patrick White's radical vision

This chapter focuses on both the fiction of Patrick White and the connections between sacredness and violence. Violence and religion are no strangers; in fact, they are intimates. Even as peace and mercy are at the core of so many world religions, violence has swirled around religious peoples and institutions for millennia. This is true, both in regard to the violence done to religious peoples by secular forces, and by other religions; and in the violence instigated or perpetrated by religious peoples or institutions against others. Religious institutions commit multiple kinds of violence. Warmly including believers, these institutions exclude those judged to be outside their belief systems, or those who have erred within. And as institutions, they have enacted and re-enacted the rituals of the scapegoat or the sacrificial victim, down through history.