麻豆社

Good Friday, and the last of journalist Madeleine Bunting's Essays on poet Matthew Arnold's
'melancholy long, withdrawing roar' - his picture in words of the decline of Christianity in this country. She has been examining the gaps left behind, and the gains enjoyed as well as the losses endured. Beliefs and ideas central to Christianity - salvation, sin, patience - have not so much disappeared, she says, but have migrated into new forms, not all of them any more beneficial than the original.

In this episode: Sacrifice. Madeleine grew up in a Catholic home. She remembers dreading Good Friday: 'It meant a long service, shuffling up and down the church for the Stations of the Cross'. All to remember a man scourged and beaten and crucified. But central to the Easter message was not violence, rather sacrifice.

Unhealthy, arguably. But today do we need sacrifice restored as a central biological and ethical principle? After all, evolution requires ceaseless sacrifices to ensure the survival of the group. It And it may be, concludes Madeleine, 'that only when an understanding of how sacrifice can be a force for good have we any hope of restraining our destructive capabilities'.