Various, 1096 to present
I want to list some of what I have witnessed, briefly, because the list is the argument.
I was not present for the First Crusade but I have spoken with scholars who documented it. I was present for the later ones, at various distances. I watched the Inquisition operate its machinery across two centuries, processing human beings through a legal system designed to produce a predetermined verdict while generating revenue for the institution conducting the trial.
I was in Germany during the Thirty Years War. A third of the population died in a conflict in which both sides had God’s explicit endorsement and both sides had priests blessing the soldiers before the killing began. I moved through that landscape carrying manuscripts and occasionally people across lines that were supposed to be impassable, because that was the only available action and inaction was not tolerable.
I watched the religious partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 produce one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Both sides had God’s blessing.
I have watched this pattern operate in every tradition I have studied, across every continent I have moved through, at every scale from one bishop’s study to civilizations consuming themselves in the name of heaven. This is not exceptional behavior. This is the reliable operational history of institutions that claim divine sanction. Sanctified Hunger documents it. Not as history. As the present tense that keeps arriving on schedule.