Copyright -- Title Page -- Series Page -- Contents -- Note on the Translation -- Foreword to the American Edition -- Prologue: The Form of the Sacred -- From Archimedes to Münchausen -- Anatomy of a Global Panic -- When Satan Casts Out Satan -- 1. Imagining the End: A Personal Journey -- Staring at Catastrophe -- Apocalypse Now -- Illich and Girard -- The Education of a Prophet of Doom -- 2. Science: A Theology in Spite of Itself -- The Purported Neutrality of Science -- The Theological-Scientific Problem -- Why We Need the Future -- When Technologies Converge -- Beyond the Obsession with Risk -- The Matrix of the Transhumanists -- The Responsibility of Science -- 3. Religion: Natural Versus Supernatural -- Looking In the Wrong Place -- Religion as Collective Effervescence -- Sacrifice and Murder -- Sacrificial Thought and the Confusion of Categories -- Religion and Morality -- Scapegoats and Sacrificial Victims -- The False Promise of Salvation by Morality -- 4. Rationality and Ritual: The Babylon Lottery -- Chance as a Solution to the Theological-Political Problem -- Reason and the Rite of Election -- The Lottery in America -- What Political Philosophy Can Learn from Anthropology -- 5. Justice and Resentment: Corruption of the Best -- Justice is Not Reducible to Logic -- Social Inequality and Humiliation -- What Economics Can Learn from Anthropology and Political Philosophy -- 6. The Nuclear Menace: A New Sacrament for Humanity -- From bin Laden to Hiroshima -- Theoretician of the Atomic Age -- The Impotence of Deterrence -- The End of Hatred and Resentment -- Epilogue: Variations on Vertigo -- Self-References -- On Madeleine's Mode of Existence -- Catastrophe and Time -- The Object of Desire -- The Sense of the Past -- Alcmena's Paradox -- Series List.