Quotes from Jonathan Kirsch

the inquisitors were especially interested in what Christians did under the covers and behind closed doors.

Salazar y Frias concluded that the witch panic had been called into existence by the witch-hunters: "I have not found the slightest evidence," he reported, "from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.

Indeed, the moral aspirations and the moral failings of polytheism and monotheism—the longing to lead a decent life in the face of the thoroughly human tendency

the most alarming fact about what happened in Salem in 1692 is the sure conviction of the civil authorities that extraordinary means were justified because of the dire threat posed to the sleepy village of Salem—"the Rendezvous of Devils," as one panic-stricken preacher put it, "where they Muster their infernal sources."14

Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of "moral justice" could occur in the American democracy.

only a few victims of the Great Terror were afforded even the parody of due process that constituted a show trial.

Then as now, demonization of the victim is the necessary precondition for genocide.

free-associative sexual libel...is typical of the impulses of religious authoritarians to demonize all heretics by attributing to them every manner of outrage that a perverse human mind could imagine.

Precisely because the Inquisition provides a blueprint for building and operating the machinery of persecution...the Inquisition was and still is a danger to human life and human liberty.

The persecutorial impulse - 'the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings as imagined agents of corruption and incarnations of evil' - seems to be hardwired into Western civilization.

The faith of ancient Israel, according to some scholars, was not Judaism or even Yahwehism but "Davidism.

heresy was often perceived by the Church as a financial or political threat rather than merely a theological one.

the workings of the Inquisition did not fundamentally change over its six-hundred-year history. The Inquisition was a machine with interchangeable parts, just as its inventors had intended...

Interrogation...was the highest art of the inquisitor.

No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition.

Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...

human beings as a species have never failed to find reasons to regard one another with fear and loathing and thus to offer violence to one another.

Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it.

What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors - the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life.

Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of 'moral justice' could occur in the American democracy.

Like the victims of the historical Inquisition and its other modern equivalents, the men and women who were targeted during the McCarthy era were not guilty of any wrongful acts; rather, they were accused only of thought-crimes.

All the weaponry and tactics that have been deployed in the war on terror are justified by precisely the same theological stance once invoked by the war on heresy.

The human imagination abhors a vacuum, after all, and seeks to fill in the blanks in a life or a history

To ignore the question renders history itself meaningless.