Melting Hearts of Stone Mary T. Condren Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? (W.B. Yeats: ‘Easter 1916’) Introduction Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote the above lines in the wake of the devastation of the First World War, and following the deaths of former friends and acquaintances executed by the British after the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. In the last thirty-five years of civil conflict in Ireland, the verse has often been repeated. But now on the world stage the discourse of sacrifice enjoys a new uncritical hegemony as it legitimizes both the war on terror, as well as the actions of those designated as ‘terrorists’. The call of Jesus (and the prophets of most religious traditions), ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice’, has been ignored. Westerners have lived in what philosopher Julia Kristeva 1 calls a ‘sacrificial social order’ in which scapegoats are continually fabricated as sacrificial victims. Given this history, and its effects on women, in particular, post-modernists need to return to those religious sources silenced, crushed (or canonized − the same thing) by the dominant authorities. Post-modern theorists could do worse than to return to the prophetic injunction, ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice’. Uttered by the Hebrew prophets, by Jesus and many saints who followed in his name, and echoed by the prophets of other religious traditions, this injunction has been largely 1 Kristeva, J. (1986), ‘Woman's time’, in Tori Moi (ed.), The Kristeva reader, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 187-213 1