Third, researchers can learn from the surge of scholarship on religious vio- lence since 9/11. That violence typically has strong emotional components and identifies the often self-destructive nature of religious violence—a window into the ambiguity of feeling and its complicated relationship to cognitive aspects of religious life. Investigation of emotion with an eye to religion and violence would steer emotions histories away from the convenient focus on rational strategies of emotional expression and concealment into waters where persons sometimes act against their self-interest, “rational choice” is a less compelling interpretive option, and questions about finality spar with concerns about his- torical contingency and relativism