Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask new questions and provide new ways of thinking about this enduring Jewish idea. Using the writings of Gershom Scholem, which ranged over the history of messianic belief and its conflicted role in the Jewish imagination, these essays put asid...

Analytic philosophy of religion is a vibrant area of inquiry, but it has generally focused on generic forms of theism or on Christianity. David Shatz here offers a new and fresh approach to the field in a wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the analytic philosophy of religion from the perspective of Judaism. Exploring classical Jewish texts about philosophical topics in light of the concepts and arguments at the heart of analytic philosophy, he demonstrates how each tradition illumin...

From young children, with their guileless, searching questions, to the recently bereaved, trying to make sense of tragic loss, humans wrestle with our relationship to God--and with God's essence, motivations, and power--throughout our lives: Why does God permit catastrophe and senseless tragedy, again and again? Is God's power limited in any way? Can He change the past? Does He know the future? Why does God require prayer? Why does He not provide stronger evidence of His presence? Whom doe...

Do human beings have free will? Are they genuinely responsible for their actions? These questions have persisted all through the history of philosophy, but in the 21st century they have become defined more sharply and clearly than ever. Indeed, a vivid and mighty tension underlies today's intellectual struggles over free will. On the one hand, the rapid advances of several empirical disciplines, notably neuropsychology and genetics, threaten our instinctive affirmation that free will and m...

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Negative theology is the attempt to describe God by speaking in terms of what God is not. Historical affinities between Jewish modernity and negative theology indicate new directions for thematizing the modern Jewish experience. Questions such as, What are the limits of Jewish modernity in terms of negativity? Has this creative tradition exhausted itself? and How might Jewish thought go forward? anchor these original essays. Taken together they explore the roots and legacies of negative th...

This book is dedicated to an analysis of the writings of modern religious Jewish thinkers who adopted a neo-fundamentalist, illusionary, apologetic approach, opposing the notion that there may sometimes be a contradiction between reason and revelation. The book deals with the thought of Eliezer Goldman, Norman Lamm, David Hartman, Aharon Lichtenstein, Jonathan Sacks, and Michael Abraham. According to these thinkers, it is possible to resolve all of the difficulties that arise from the enco...

A monumental six-volume set that presents an undeniable case for the revealed authority of God to a generation that has forgotten who he is and what he has done.

An Intellectually Rich and Challenging Exploration of Modern Jewish Theology"How we deal with revelation determines how we handle the issue of authority in belief and practice. How we understand authority determines how we deal with the claims of the tradition on us; how we deal with those claims determines how we shape our own Judaism. That conclusion opens the gate to a reconsideration of all of Judaism's theology, in particular how we understand God, for God is ...

Truth?Can we know it? Many people today would say no–we can’t. This paradigmatic shift to relativism presents a direct challenge to the Christian’s witness and the challenge must be answered.In this timely new resource, noted scholar John Feinberg argues that truth is both real and knowable, offering us a robust guide to Christian apologetics for engagement with our world today.

2022 Top Five Reference Book from Academy of Parish ClergyThe most comprehensive book on the topic, Thinking about Good and Evil traces the most salient Jewish ideas about why innocent people seem to suffer, why evil individuals seem to prosper, and God’s role in such matters of (in)justice, from antiquity to the present.Starting with the Bible and Apocrypha, Rabbi Wayne Allen takes us through the Talmud; medieval Jewish philosophers and Jewish mystical sources; th...

In the light of the threats posed to Christianity by militant Islam, intolerant secularism, and widespread misinformation (The Da Vinci Code, the Jesus Seminar, etc.), the necessity of informed and articulate defense of the Christian faith today can hardly be contested. Reasons for Our Hope offers a sophisticated yet accessible guide to "destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and . . . taking every thought captive to the obed...