Unheroic Conduct (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Cultu, #8)
by Contributor Daniel Boyarin
The world we engage with is a vibrant collage brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is through the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed-this is where religious scholar Michael Fishbane dwells in his latest contribution to Jewish thought. In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classic...
A Spiritual Travel Guide to the World of God
by Rabbi Michele Brand Medwin O D
Classical Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism
by Bruce D. Chilton and Jacob Neusner
Among the world's religions, Christianity and Judaism are the most symmetrical. But in our day of religious tolerance, a tendency to overlook the vital differences between the two religions in the name of good will can undermine constructive Jewish-Christian dialogue. In this book, Bruce D. Chilton describes early Christian thought and Jacob Neusner describes early Judaic thought on fundamental issues such as creation and human nature, Christ and Torah, sin and atonement, and eschatology. At the...
Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical...
Jewish Theology for a Postmodern Age (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)
by Miriam Feldmann Kaye
In the postmodern, relativist world-view with its refutation of a single, objective, and ultimate truth, it has become difficult if not impossible to argue in favour of one's own beliefs as preferable to those of others. Miriam Feldmann Kaye's pioneering study is one of the first English-language books to address Jewish theology from a postmodern perspective, probing the question of how Jewish theology has the potential to survive the postmodern onslaught that some see as heralding the collapse...
Focusing on the secular society of contemporary Israel, this collection of essays examines the way civil religion invents collective rites for turning points in community life, and personal definitional rites for ratification of identity change in the individual's life cycle.
The Talmud's Theological Language-Game (SUNY series in Jewish Philosophy)
by Eugene B. Borowitz
Contemporary Jews often find meaning in Judaism's family and communal orientation, its beautiful rituals, its enriching culture, its sense of ethnic rootedness, and its moral values. For the classical Jewish tradition, however, all of these features of Judaism depend on a belief in God. Since many modern Jews do not know what to make of that belief, it is often ignored. They may be inspired by Judaism's high regard for education and its passion for justice, but their belief in God rests on child...
The Concept of the Covenant in the Second Temple Period (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, #71)
During the reign of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, the Jews returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. This Second Temple period is characterised by a changing mode of thinking. This volume traces the development of the concept of the covenant during this important era, by discussing relevant texts among the Apocrypha, such as Wisdom of Solomon; the Pseudepigrapha, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jubilees; and the New Testament, such as the Pauline Letters. The authors...