This book reimagines Judaism and Jewish identity after the time-honored method of negative theology. It builds on negations that clear space for revisioning of such topics as creation and revelation, the people and State of Israel, history and suffering, ritual and ethics, God and spiritual life. The theology builds on thought from key figures in the history of Jewish philosophy and serves along the way as an introduction to them, including Ecclesiastes, Philo, Saadia Gaon, Judah Halevi, M...

This book takes one step further the long-standing debate among scholars of religious antiquity over when and why a parting of the ways happened between Judaism and Christianity in the early centuries of the Common Era. It explores three interrelated questions: what might have happened to prevent that split; how might Western religion have looked had the split not occurred; and how might features of that religion, which never existed, nonetheless manifest in some of the literature and artw...

From Ecclesiastes to Simone Weil: Varieties of Philosophical Spirituality reads major philosophers from the Western philosophical canon and beyond for the spirituality implicit in their metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic. Its aim is to revive for the modern reader the spiritual import of philosophy as an area of inquiry and study. Spirituality is understood as a lived orientation towards the sacred. The sacred is characterized as the source of all being and human well...

Challenge Yourself to Delve into a Deeper Interfaith DialogueTo wrestle with the ideas these thinkers present is to find ourselves challenged to look at our own religious lives in new ways; and to appreciate the spiritual endeavors of others, whatever form their religious expression may take. To engage with these thinkers can leave us enlarged in our perception of human religiousness and deepened in our appreciation of it. from the ConclusionThe modern age of religion is c...

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...

"A well-organized and engaging read."-Religious Studies ReviewThe first in-depth look at...an important nineteenth century Jewish thinker and historian. Well-written [and] well- researched."-The Jerusalem Post Magazine"A significant contribution to our understanding of the rise of modern Judaism in its East European manifestation."-ChoiceHarris examines Nachman Krochmal's work, particularly as it aimed to guide Jews throu...

Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, liv...

This book aims to interpret ‘Jewish Philosophy’ in terms of the Marrano phenomenon: as a conscious clinamen of philosophical forms used in order to convey a ‘secret message’ which cannot find an open articulation.The Marrano phenomenon is employed here, in the domain of modern philosophical thought, where an analogous tendency can be seen: the clash of an open idiom and a secret meaning, which transforms both the medium and the message. Focussing on key figures of late mod...

Rabbi Jacob Agus' (1911-1986) intellectual production spanned nearly a half century and covered an enormous historical and conceptual range, from the biblical to the modern era. Best known as an important Jewish scholar, he also held important rabbinic, teaching, and public positions. Although born and raised within an orthodox setting, Agus was strongly influenced by American liberalism and his work displayed modernizing sympathies, reservations about nationalism--including some forms of ...

This short and remarkable book presents the essential teachings of Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement which swept through Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their relevance to our lives. Told through legendary tales of the Hasidic masters, together with Bubers own unique insights, The Way of Man offers us a way of understanding ourselves and our place in a spiritual world.

An "engagingly personal" exploration of Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, and the relationship between philosophy and religion ( Times Literary Supplement).In this book, distinguished philosopher and practicing Jew Hilary Putnam questions the thought of three major Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century—Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas—to help him reconcile the philosophical and religious sides of his life. An additional presence in the ...

2016 Christianity Today Book of the Year in Apologetics/EvangelismOne of Desiring God's Top 15 Books of 2015Hearts Minds Bookstore's Best Books of 2015, Social Criticism and Cultural EngagementIn our post-Christian context, public life has become markedly more secular and private life infinitely more diverse. Yet many Christians still rely on cookie-cutter approaches to evangelism and apologetics. Most of these methods assume that people ar...