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The grand inquisitor's manual : a history of terror in the name of God / Jonathan Kirsch.

by Kirsch, Jonathan, 1949-

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HarperOne, c2008.

Terror -- Religious aspects -- Christianity -- History.

296 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-283) and index.

The Pietà and the pear -- The Cathar kiss -- The hammer of heretics -- Crime and punishment -- The inquisitor's manual -- Purity of blood -- The eternal inquisitor -- American inquisition.

"The inquisitorial apparatus that was first invented in the Middle Ages remained in operation for the next six hundred years, and it has never been wholly dismantled. As we shall see, an unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early thirteenth century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid-twentieth century. Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag; it can be traced through the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."--P. 3.

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