A slow but steady trend to decline routine immunization has evolved over the past few decades, despite its pivotal role in staving off life-threatening communicable diseases. Religious beliefs are among the reasons given for exemptions. In the context of an overview of various religious approaches to this issue, this article addresses the Jewish religious obligation to immunize. The latter is nested in the more general obligation to take responsibility for one’s health as it is essential to living a morally productive (...) life. Furthermore, the individual’s responsibility extends to supporting communal health by contributing to herd immunity. Judaism embraces evidence-based information regarding immunization safety and efficacy and holds the resulting professional guidelines to be religiously binding. From a Jewish perspective, government bodies need to weigh respect for individual autonomy to refrain from immunization against preserving public safety, such that waiving autonomy should be reserved for immediately life-threatening situations. Nurses’ knowledge and understanding of the Jewish legal approach as explicated in this article and those of other religions in which similar principles apply (such as Islam and Christianity) can enrich their awareness of how revering God can go hand in hand with an obligation to prevent illness for the self and the community by immunizing. (shrink)

In almost all of the teaching of religion it is possible to find the message of peace and violence. Islam, as a word means peace, well-being, tranquility and surrender. The claim that Islam is a religion of peace, stems from its lexical meaning. The Torah aims to protect the peace of individuals and communities that have a different faith and relationship based on justice and empathy. The Ten Commandments is recognized as a basic summary of the belief system of Jews. (...) Christianity defined itself as a religion based on love. Christians claim that God himself is love, Jesus, apostles, the church fathers ultimately all Christians are messengers of love and the people are builders of peace. The perspective on sacred texts can affect the message that you try to deduce, with this assumption, the opposing ideas of people which are derived from Holy Scriptures can be based on their personality, family and social experience. In this study, the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam will be taken into account and by using a holistic approach, it will try to put forward a message that constitute to the theological basis that members of the same faith or different religions that can live in peace. In the introduction, a brief summary of their contribution to world peace is given. The main body of the article is organized in comparative study under three parts: religions contribution to peace in individual, family and societal life. In this scope, a measure of understanding among, first Orthodox and other Judaism branches, has been identified on message of of peace, then the same process is repeated for Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christianity. In Islam, the message of peace has been identified by individual verses as well as their application through its Prophet. (shrink)

This brilliant and engaging critical encounter between Jean-Francois Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber has as its focus a single punctuation mark-the hyphen connecting "Jew" and "Christian" in the expression "Judeo-Christian." While focusing on the nature, meaning, and function of this hyphen, the authors are able to analyze many of the essential differences between Judaism and Christianity, as well as the most significant historical and political consequences of these differences from the Roman Empire to the Shoah. Beginning with a reading (...) of the Letters of Paul, they contrast the Jewish and Christian positions on a variety of issues ranging from emancipation, history, sacrifice, incarnation, faith, law, and sexual difference to the value that is accorded reading, writing, and interpretation within these two traditions. (shrink)

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence offered as a set and also separately. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle--the (...) philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is--and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state. The Marrano of Reason The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this-worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands. (shrink)

This book discusses Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), the Christian missionary, philosopher and mystic, his relations with Jewish contemporaries, and how he ...

The evil of the holocaust demands a radical rethink of the traditional Christian understanding of Judaism. This does not mean jettisoning Christianity's deepest convictions in order to make it conform to Judaism. Rather, Richard Harries develops the work of recent Jewish scholarship to discern resonances between central Christian and Jewish beliefs. This thought-provoking book offers fresh approaches to contentious and sensitive issues. A key chapter on the nature of forgiveness is sympathetic to the Jewish charge that Christians (...) talk much too easily about forgiveness. Another chapter on suffering in Judaism and Christianity rejects the usual stereotypes and argues for important common ground, for example in the idea that God suffers in the suffering of his people. There are also chapters on the state of Israel and the place of Jerusalem in Christian and Jewish thought. Richard Harries argues that the basic covenant is not with either Judaism or Christianity but with humanity. These, like other religions, are different, distinctive voices in response to God's primal affirmation of human life, which for Christians is achieved and given in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the light of this the author maintains - controversially - that Christians should not be trying to convert Jews to Christianity. Rather Jews and Christians should stand together and build on the great amount they have in common to work together for a better world. (shrink)

Is the good news of Jesus Christ bad news for the Jewish neighbor? -- Kierkegaard and Hegel on Abraham : the openness and complexity of the modern context -- The problem, part I : the "perfect storm" of Christological interpretive imperialism -- The problem, part II : the good news of the Gospel and the bad news for the children of Abraham -- The remedy, part I : dispersing the "perfect storm" -- The remedy, part II : the debt to (...) modernity : interpretive imperialism in a higher key -- The remedy, part III : Abraham must die -- Postmodern discernment and the limits of the ethical : the way of justice -- The problem as remedy : an interpretive imperialism "without weapons"? -- Conclusion : faith seeking the ethical. (shrink)

The Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse is a unique and controversial analysis of the genesis and evolution of Judeo-Christian intellectual thought. Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton argue that the Judaic and Christian heirs of Scripture adopted, and adapted to their own purposes, Greek philosophical modes of thought, argument and science. Intellectual Foundations of Christian and Jewish Discourse explores how the earliest intellectuals of Christianity and Judaism shaped a tradition of articulated conflict and reasoned argument in the (...) search for religious truth and focuses especially on methods of discourse in the Judaic and Christian intellectual and literary traditions. (shrink)

This is the first critical edition and study of a unique and important Muslim polemic against Christians and Jews. The Book of Disputation was written in Arabic by a Mudejar (subject Muslim living under Christian rule in late medieval Iberia) and offers new insight into the cultural and intellectual life of this Muslim minority. The text advances arguments drawn from natural philosophy-largely from Aristotle and Averroes-along with more traditional revealed sources such as the Qur'an and the Bible. Mudejar communities suffered (...) a diminution of religious and political intelligentsia over time. This text, however, highlights the author's particular conception of the world as the creation of God in his defense of Islam, demonstrates the vitality of intellectual life among Muslims in medieval Christian Iberia, and documents the continued cultivation of natural philosophy within these Muslim communities. (shrink)

First, this collection seeks to examine exactly what Levinass writings mean for both Jews and Christians. Second, it takes a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue, using Levinas as the rationale for the discussion. Three generations of Levinas scholars are represented. Contributors: Leora Batnitzky, Jeffrey Bloechl, Richard A. Cohen, Paul Franks, Robert Gibbs, Kevin Hart, Dana Hollander, Robyn Horner, Jeffrey L. Kosky, Jean-Luc Marion, Michael Purcell, Michael A. Signer, Merold Westphal, Elliott R. Wolfson, Edith Wyschogrod.

The central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. This article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory. In this respect the article follows a two-fold logic. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx, it seeks to recover what is 'rational in religion'; and, at the (...) same time, examines the continuing entanglements of politics with religious categories. That this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous. On the contrary, it is precisely the 'secularisation' of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegel and Marx's respective theorisation of history, that provides the dialectic ground of the atheistic recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought in recent political philosophy. Consequently the discussion of religion, or 'religion beyond religion', here, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalism in the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-Pagan mysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religion in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, 'religion' here, in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universal emancipatory politics. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into (...) existence. This volume covers three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

This definitive book considers the way in which Christianity relates to the other world faiths. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This work focuses on Latin Judaica and Biblical interpretation with a primary emphasis on texts that were found in the library of Archbishop Narcissus Marsh of Dublin. This remarkable collection of Latin Judaica, Polyglot Bibles, and other works sheds light on the way in which the Protestant Reformation dealt both with Jews, and the Bible, the Jewish Kabbalah and religious toleration or intolerance. The articles contained herein will be of especial interest to historians of religion and philosophy, and those (...) dealing with Jewish-Christian relations and the manner in which Biblical interpretation was changed as a result of seventeenth-century influences. The articles also weave a new approach to the broad history of religious toleration. Philosophers, political thinkers, religious clerics, and budding anthropologists look at Judaism, Christianity, Kabbalah, and the Bible under a new and vastly more modern lens. (shrink)

Erasmus of Rotterdam was the greatest Christian humanist scholar of the Northern European Renaissance, a correspondent of Sir Thomas More and many other learned men of his time, known to his contemporaries and to posterity for subtlety of his thought and the depth of his learning. He was also, according to some modern writers, an anti-Semite. In this complete analysis of all of Erasmus' writings on Jews and Judaism, Shimon Markish asserts that the accusation cannot be sustained. For (...) Markish, to ask whether Erasmus was a friend or enemy of the Jews is to ask a modern question of a sixteenth-century man, whose attitude can best be called "asemitism." Erasmus' chief preoccupation was with the future of "the true philosophy of Christ"; he had little interest in the Jewish community of his own time. Erasmus and the Jews discusses Erasmus' critique of Mosaic law and his view of the conflict between "Judaism" as legalistic morality and Jesus' teaching; his judgment on the Pharisees of Jesus' time; his emphasis on the importance of the study of Hebrew; and his opinions of sixteenth-century Jews. This meticulous analysis reveals an Erasmus who defended his vision of true piety by rejecting "Judaizing" Christians more than Jews and who saw the Old Testament as integral to the Christian worldview. As a Christian, he regretted nonbelief and pitied unbelievers, without vicious hostility toward any single people. His theological opposition to a form of religious thought which he identified with Judaism was not translated into crude prejudice against actual Jews. In general, his calm consideration of the strange and the foreign and his willingness to restrict his judgments to the philosophical realm were, Markish argues, early and significant steps toward enlightened toleration. Markish's discussion of Erasmus is supplemented with an Afterword by theologian and philosopher Arthur A. Cohen, who offers a variant interpretation of Erasmus' writings and attitudes. The juxtaposed arguments of the two scholars make this an especially illuminating work for any student of Erasmus and his influence. Erasmus and the Jews also gives a necessary clarity to our understanding of the meaning of anti-Semitism and the history of religious toleration. Markish's profound knowledge of Erasmus allows him to demonstrate the fundamental importance of putting arguments and terminology in the context of a thinker's work and his own time. (shrink)

A lecture course on the interaction of Philosophy and Religion in Western thought, available in video and audio formats published by The Great Courses.

A re-examination of the case of Johann Reuchlin, one of the best-known controversies of the 16th century.

The central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. This article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory. In this it follows a twofold logic. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx it seeks to recover what is ‘rational in religion’; at the same time, it (...) examines the continuing entanglements of politics with religious categories. That this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous. On the contrary, it is precisely the ‘secularisation’ of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegel and Marx's respective theorisations of history that provides the dialectical ground for the atheistic recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought in recent political philosophy. Consequently, this discussion of religion, or ‘religion beyond religion’, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalism in the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-pagan mysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religion in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, ‘religion’ here, in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universal emancipatory politics. (shrink)

Many studies written about the Jewish-Christian relationship are primarily historical overviews that focus on the Jewish background of Christianity, the separation of Christianity from Judiasm, or the medieval disputations between the two faiths. This book is one of the first studies to examine the relationship from a philosophical and theological viewpoint. Carefully drawing on Jewish classical sources, Novak argues that there is actual justification for the new relationship between Judaism and Christianity from within Jewish religious tradition. (...) He demonstrates that this new relationship is possible between religiously committed Jews and Christians without the two major impediments to dialogue: triumphalism and relativism. One of the very few books on this topic written by a Jewish theologian who speaks specifically to modern Christian concerns, it will provide the groundwork for a more serious development of Jewish-Christian dialogue in our day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the BuddhaAlon Goshen-GottsteinBeside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha. Edited by Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. 284 pp.Religion,Wilfred Cantwell Smith teaches us, is about people, not about ideas. This remarkable collection of essays provides us with a glimpse into people, their spiritual aspirations, and their life journeys. (...) This collection of narratives of Jews and Christians, who recount the story of their involvement with Buddhism, turns out to be a powerful spiritual medium. It allows us to get to know, at times in a very intimate and revealing manner, the stories, struggles, and processes that have shaped participants in this enterprise. Many of the participants are well-known figures in academia and in religious or interfaith circles. Getting to know the person behind the idea, or the book, is always a valuable means of grounding and contextualizing what might otherwise be disembodied ideas or concepts. But the volume does much more than introduce us to an impressive array of sensitive and thoughtful personalities. Through the life stories told in this volume, key elements of the relationship between the three religions—theological, philosophical, and ritual—are confronted. The flow of the book moves in interesting ways between the personal, philosophical, theological, experiential, and mystical, as the various life stories weave the greater whole of this book. The sum total of the fourteen stories of Jews and Christians and their encounter with Buddhism provides an interesting vantage point on the Jewish-Buddhist and the Christian-Buddhist encounters. (I use the term "encounter," as opposed to "dialogue," following the distinction made in this volume byE.Burke Rochford Jr.; "encounter" involves personal change and transformation, something shared by nearly all participants in this volume.) From this perspective, interesting observations emerge regarding the ways in which the encounter impacts and interfaces with both Judaism and Christianity, on the sociological, ritual, theological, and experiential levels. The juxtaposition of two sets of stories, Jewish and Christian, allows us, finally, to make some interesting observations on the difference between these two parallel sets of encounters with Buddhism. [End Page 259]The concept underlying this volume—sharing stories, short spiritual biographies —suggests the growing importance of biography or autobiography and narrative in the study of religion. This collection of short contemporary spiritual biographies makes us aware of the importance of narrative as part of spiritual process, and of its sharing. As the reader discovers, storytelling is a very powerful medium for conveying ideas and sharing processes. Something of the transformative nature of the very enterprise of encounter is thus communicated through the medium of this book. There is no doubt that every reader of this book who is sympathetic to the sensibilities of interreligious encounter will be moved and inspired by some of the stories and testimonies here collected.The strengths of Beside Still Waters are also its weaknesses. The medium of storytelling calls for particular literary skills quite distinct from the spiritual and intellectual qualities that have rightly earned participants in this volume their place in it. Moreover, not all participants are able to share a personal, let alone a spiritual, process. Some of the writers (Cobb, Lubarsky) share an intellectual journey, couched in the appropriate autobiographical context. Others (notably Muck) offer theological insight. At the other extreme, a significant group of Christian contributors shares with us some of the most intimate mystical moments of their spiritual odyssey. The uniform assignment that contributors were asked to fulfill has thus been variously interpreted. This makes the book both highly interesting and, in some sense, weak. The lack of consistent focus takes the reader on a ride between a range of dimensions and experiences—intellectual, experiential, mystical, sociological, and more. With the exception of the mystical-experiential dimension that looms large in some of thepresentations, none of the substantive issues is ever fully developed. The cross between autobiography and religious reflection whets one's reflective appetite, offering tantalizing theological insight, only to fade into one of the dimensions of narrative through which the individual contributors address their task. The sum total of the... (shrink)

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence. Yirmiyahu Yovel shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle--the philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is--and how he thereby anticipated (...) secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state.The Marrano of ReasonThe Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this-worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands. (shrink)

This collection of essays focuses on sacrifice in the context of Jewish and Christian scripture and is inspired by the thought and writings of Rene Girard. The contributors engage in a dialogue with Girard in their search for answers to key questions about the relation between religion and violence. The book is divided into two parts. The first opens with a conversation in which Rene Girard and Sandor Goodhart explore the relation between imitation and violence throughout human history, especially in (...) religious culture. It is followed by essays on the subject of sacrifice contributed by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field, including Bruce Chilton, Robert Daly, Louis Feldman, Michael Fishbane, Erich Gruen, and Alan Segal. The second part contains essays on specific scriptural texts. The authors explore new ways of applying Girardian analysis to episodes of sacrifice and scapegoating, demonstrating that fertile ground remains to further our understanding of violence in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. "In increasing numbers, scholars are turning to the mimetic theory espoused by Rene Girard in their research for answers to key questions about religion and violence. For the first time, the editors of this volume place in conversation with each other scholars who, from the perspective of Christian and Jewish traditions and scholarship, engage from the perspective of mimetic theory the sacrificial and antisacrificial features of ancient Judaism and early Christianity and explore their subsequent trajectories." --_Martha Reineke, University of Northern Iowa _. (shrink)

impermissibly favorable to Jews? -- Humanist origins -- Humanism at court -- Discovery of Hebrew -- Johannes Pfefferkorn and the campaign against Jews -- Who saved the Jewish books? -- Inquisition -- Trial at Rome and the Christian debates -- The Luther affair -- As if the first martyr of Hebrew letters.

Religions; Islam; relations; Christianity; Judaism; Christianity and other religions; Other (Philosophy); religious aspects; Islam.

Thomas d'Aquin a lu attentivement Maïmonide, il a recouru à lui pour préciser sa pensée sur les rapports entre la créature et Dieu. Sur certains points - les attributs divins, la Providence et la prophétie - il arrive à Thomas d'Aquin de critiquer, voire de refuser des positions de Maïmonide.

L'A. se base sur deux oeuvres artistiques sur la Trinité qui se correspondent et qui soulèvent des questions sérieuses au sujet de la négociation chrétienne avec les autres religions. Ces deux oeuvres traitent de la Trinité en relation avec les autres traditions religieuses. Il s'agit de l'icône intitulée la Trinité de l'orthodoxe russe André Roublev qui date du 15siècle et de l'oeuvre contemporaine de l'artiste indien catholique romain Jyoti Sahi intitulée Abraham et Sarah recevant les trois anges. Par cette (...) étude comparative, l'A. souligne la richesse du Dieu trinitaire dans l'ouverture à la multiplicité des représentations du mystère infini. Ces représentations, visibles dans les créations, sont parfois le fruit de l'imagination des artistes et des théologiens, imagination qui est nécessaire. (shrink)

This meticulously researched study is based on a comprehensive reading of all the major Jewish sources from the Geonic period in the ninth century until the dawn of the Haskalah in the late eighteenth century. Its clearly written and carefully documented exposition of the philosophical arguments used by Jews to refute four central doctrines of Christianity (trinity, incarnation, transubstantiation, and virgin birth) makes a major contribution to a relatively neglected area of medieval Jewish intellectual history.

It is a remarkable fact that the writings of Philo, the Jew from Alexandria, were preserved because they were taken up in the Christian tradition. But the story of how this process of reception and appropriation took place has never been systematically research. In this book the author first examines how Philo's works are related to the New Testament and the earliest Chritian writing, and then how they were used by Greek and Latin church fathers up to 400 c.e., with (...) special attention to the contributions of Clement, Origen, Didymus, Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and Augstine. Philo in Early Christian Literature is a valuable guide to the state of scholarly research on a subject that has thus far been investigated in a rather piecemeal fashion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transcendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian, and Primal TraditionsSarah K. PinnockTranscendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian, and Primal Traditions. By John D'Arcy May. New York: Continuum, 2003. 225 + xi pp.In popular media, religion appears as a dangerous social phenomenon with explosive potential. The investigation of transcendence as a source of violence is particularly timely in light of America's war on terrorism targeting extremist (...) Islam. However, this negative dimension of religion is nothing new. Over the course of history, hostility [End Page 231] and killing are intimately connected with religious divisions. The irony of religious violence as a betrayal of religious ethical ideals is both obvious and inescapable.Approaching this hot topic from the perspective of religious imperialism, John D'Arcy May examines violence perpetrated by the Christian and Buddhist traditions against indigenous religions. His investigation covers damaging evidence against these two universalizing traditions using geographically specific case studies in Asia and the Pacific Rim. Situating Christianity and Buddhism in parallel as religions of transcendence, he compares how indigenous localized religions were overpowered by expansionist universalizing religions, although not eradicated. Into his historical narrative, he weaves his personal encounters with otherness growing up in Australia while virtually oblivious to the oppression of Aboriginals by white settlers, and as a Roman Catholic doing ecumenical work in Papua New Guinea for four years.May opens the book with bold admission of the failures of European Christianity, evidenced in anti-Judaism and Holocaust genocide, and Theravada Buddhism's violent involvement in Sri Lanka's civil conflict between Singhalese nationalists and Hindu Tamils. The reader is led to expect elaboration on the moral failings of Christianity, and this proves true; however, May's examination of the Buddhism's expansion and endorsement of violence tempers the tendency to single out Christianity as uniquely imperialist. He suggests that transcendence itself can cause hierarchy and oppression.Part I of the book focuses on Christianity and violence. Chapter 1 studies how European Protestant and Catholic settlers to Australia treated the Aboriginal peoples. The story is grim. Using a psychoanalytic framework, May interprets the European vilification of Aboriginals as stemming from the repression of the primal other, and the repression of bio-cosmic religion in favor of transcendence. Constructively, he proposes that Aboriginal peoples can offer theological insights about the ontology of sacred space. Christians should not only seek reconciliation in society, but also consider new perspectives on the sacred in nature drawn from the dreaming of Aboriginal religious lore.In chapter 2, May deals with colonization in the Melanesian Islands of the Pacific Ocean, concentrating on Papua New Guinea. In the indigenous religions of Melanesia, the prosperous community is the measure of religious rectitude, while misfortune is explained by the breaking of taboos and the revenge of enemies or evil spirits. After European colonization, "cargo cults" arose among the islands that promised abundant material goods possessed by European settlers by means of religious rituals and magic. Surprisingly, May points out the positive impulses at the root of these cargo cults that are typically viewed as detrimental and even outlawed outright by local governments for their harmful social impact. At bottom, he argues, cargo cults reflect a positive religious aspiration for wholeness and healing in this life that is a counterpoint to the spiritualization of salvation by European Christianity.May tries to avoid idealizing these primal cultures and their religious insights; nevertheless, he finds them instructive for Christian theology. Native religions in both Australia and Papua New Guinea offer models of immanence that emphasize the religious value of nature and just relationships. It should be mentioned that [End Page 232] there is some nuance to this conclusion. For instance, Melanesian religion is portrayed as less exemplary than Australian aboriginal religion. But May's main point is that violence on a global scale is validated by Christian notions of transcendence that deny the material aspirations of the indigenous community, and promote a superiority that wreaks violence among indigenous peoples. Hopefully, intercultural theology will allow Christians to appreciate the Aboriginal respect for sacred geography and the Melanesian quest for the flourishing of one's local community.Christianity and Buddhism are treated... (shrink)

The Christian religion shares with all major religions a vision of reality informed by a specific cluster of metaphors. The Christian religion also shares with its parent religion, Judaism, and with the other major Western religion, Islam, the peculiarity that it is a religion of the book. The latter statement demands further elaboration. To speak of Western religions as religions of the book does not mean that they are only religions of a text; indeed, (...) specific historical persons and events are central to all Western religions, and one need not insist upon a "theology of word" as distinct from either a "theology of events" or a "theology of sacrament" to admit scriptural normativity. In fact, not only Reformed Christianity insists that certain texts be taken as normative for interpreting Christianity's root metaphors. Whatever their hesitation over the sixteenth-century Reformer's formulation of Sola Scriptura and however strong their insistence upon uniting Sacrament to Word for a full understanding of the root metaphors of Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox Christians have joined their Protestant colleagues in insisting upon the priority of the Scriptures. Indeed, to interpret the root metaphors of the Christian religion, the Scriptures must function, in the words of the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner as the norma normans non normata for all Christian theologies. David Tracy, author of Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology and The Analogical Imagination in Contemporary Theology, is professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (shrink)

Jewish learning and thought in Languedoc -- 1250-1300: implications of original philosophic work and the diffusion of philosophic learning in Languedoc -- 1250-1300: Jewish contacts with Christian intellectuals and Jewish thought regarding Christianity -- Meiri's transformation of Talmud study: philosophic spirituality in a halakhic key -- 1300: on the eve of the controversy -- 1300-1304: knowledge and authority in dispute -- 1304-1306: the controversy peaks -- The effects of the expulsion: Jewish philosophic culture in Roussillon and Provence.

This book closely examines our commonly held beliefs about human suffering, and offers unique insights into God's role in why we suffer. Dr. Perri critically examines what it means to be human from a Judeo-Christian perspective, and extrapolates from the work of Carl Gustav Jung showing a deeply complex development of human transcendence in human suffering. On an interpersonal level, Dr. Perri elaborates on the work of Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas and shows how our suffering can be shared and (...) lessened by our unconditionality and presence for the other. Scriptural passages are quoted from both the Hebrew and New Testament texts, and are used to depict the suffering of humankind as seen in the face of Job. It was this face, according to Perri, that Jesus saw in the faces of those He came to redeem, and that ultimately brought Him to the crucifix of redemption. Dr. Perri challenges Sartre's position that our existence precedes our essence, and draws on the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Christian theology in this regard. He further elaborates a neurodevelopmental paradigm that creates essence as the basis of our freedom to choose. This book can be read and studied by both professionals in the helping and healing professions, and lay persons seeking to better understand our suffering, and how to better help those who suffer. Dr. Perri offers specific ways in how to be present for those who suffer, how to read and receive the hidden language of human suffering, and how to use silence as a communication skill. (shrink)

This collection of essays by Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars underscores the significance of sustained and serious ethical, interreligious and interdisciplinary reflection on children. Essays in the first half of the volume discuss fundamental beliefs and practices within the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam regarding children, adult obligations to them, and a child's own obligations to others. The second half of the volume focuses on selected contemporary challenges regarding children and faithful responses to them. Marcia J. (...) Bunge brings together scholars from various disciplines and diverse strands within these three religious traditions, representing several views on essential questions about the nature and status of children and adult-child relationships and responsibilities. The volume not only contributes to intellectual inquiry regarding children in the specific areas of ethics, religious studies, children's rights and childhood studies, but also provides resources for child advocates, religious leaders and those engaged in interreligious dialogue. (shrink)

Xenophobic attitudes and violence have become regular phenomena in South Africa and other parts of the world. Xenophobia is of great concern not only to South Africans, but also to most developed countries or countries that are considered economically and politically viable by their neighbours, and which offer a safe haven for people who, for whatever reason, are forced to seek refuge elsewhere. Although xenophobia is not unique to South Africa, its most worrying aspect in South Africa is the (...) government’s inability to deal with this evil. The article seeks to challenge South Africa as a dominantly Ubuntu and Judeo-Christian influenced country to fight xenophobia through appealing to Ubuntu values and philoxenia. By Judeo-Christian, I mean religious beliefs and values that are common to both these religions, namely Judaism and Christianity. The article further suggests the ontology that perceives the ‘other’ as an extension of the self. It is argued that South African citizens are collectively responsible for acts of violence against foreign nationals and should thus look for a morally sustainable solution to this evil. The article relies heavily on the work of Kristeva, entitled Strangers to Ourselves, and on the work of Nussbaum, entitled Ubuntu: Reflections of a South African on Our Common Humanity, in Reflections, the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (shrink)

Vladimir Soloviev et Jacques Maritain sont des philosophes pour aujourd'hui et pour demain. Ils ont laissé des œuvres considérables par leur originalité, leur profondeur et la qualité de leur style. Célèbres, puis un peu oubliés, ces deux talentueux penseurs ont cherché la vérité. Ni Soloviev ni Maritain n'ont eu d'ailleurs des carrières académiques classiques, et la liberté que donne une vie dispensée d'obligations administratives a probablement favorisé leur remarquable créativité. L'un et l'autre ont aimé non seulement le Christ, mais aussi (...) son Eglise tout en ayant des appartenances confessionnelles différentes. "L'ouvrage que l'on présente ici est le fruit de deux colloques tenus successivement à Moscou et à Kiev en 2006. Il s'agissait de faire mieux connaître Soloviev en Occident et Maritain en Russie ou en Ukraine. C'est une manière de dialogue entre deux inspirations que l'on pourrait rattacher à Platon dans le cas de Soloviev et à Aristote avec Maritain, mais aussi et surtout à un personnalisme chrétien qui les caractérise.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of Country and Love of God: The Political Uses of Religion in MachiavelliBenedetto Fontana*This paper will discuss the place of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. 1 The traditional and generally accepted interpretation presents Machiavelli’s religion as a belief system whose value is determined by its functional utility to the state. In this he is said to resemble Cicero, 2 Montesquieu, 3 and Tocqueville, 4 among others. This view is (...) based on the proposition—one that is now fundamental to a modern understanding of Machiavelli—that his political theory develops a politics without moral, theological, and religious foundations (what Benedetto Croce 5 calls the “autonomy of politics” and Sheldon Wolin 6 the “autonomy of political theory”). Students of Machiavelli who ascribe to him an instrumentalist theory of religion rest their interpretation on this conception of politics: a distinction is established between religion viewed as religio, and religion conceived as fides, where the former is used to develop and cement social bonds and the latter is a faith based on a transcendent “truth.”A reading of the texts shows that Machiavelli discusses various kinds of religion. He refers, for example, to multiple forms of Christianity, such as “primitive” [End Page 639] or original Christianity, 7 official, medieval Christianity, the ecclesiastical principality of the papacy, as well as to ancient Judaism, 8 paganism, and to Islam. 9 However, it is possible to discern in Machiavelli two principal or distinctive types. One is based on the opposition Machiavelli sees between the religion of the Romans (which instills virtù) and the religion of the post-classical and post-Roman Christian world (which teaches humility and passivity). The other is prophetic religion, in which Machiavelli contrasts the prophet armed to the prophet unarmed. Thus, we have prophetic religion and non-prophetic religion; the former is either armed or unarmed, and the latter is either immanent (natural) or transcendent. 10Machiavelli’s stress on the importance of virtù (whether of the prince or of the people) suggests that religion is not simply religio—that is, a political technique to rule and to control the masses. Rather, it presupposes a concern for a moral fides which, though certainly not transcendent, is nevertheless necessary to the construction of a political order based on virtù. His concern with civil and military virtue links the armed prophetic religion with that of the ancient Romans, such that ancient Judaism, Islam, and a reformed Christianity (a kind of Lutheranism ante litteram) all stand opposed to primitive and post-classical Christianity.Machiavelli anticipates in theory the national, anti-papal, and anti-imperial movements that were later realized in history by the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations. He attempts to infuse the corrupt and decadent Christian conception of the world with a new, innovating spirit, one opposed to the prevailing medieval and scholastic conception of the world. In the past Christian philosophers and thinkers revised the classical notions of virtus and arete, transforming them into Christian concepts of value. Machiavelli attempts a similar “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche), but for different ends and in a different direction: he reinterprets the Christian religion in order to assimilate it into his conception of virtù and his vision of a vivere civile.In the first part of this paper the relation Machiavelli establishes between “speaking with God” and the founding and/or reforming of states is explored. Parallels between Christian and pre-Christian (pagan and biblical) rulers reveal a basic ambiguity in Machiavelli’s belief that religion—that is, the claim of having spoken with God—is necessary to effective rule. In the second part [End Page 640] Machiavelli’s teaching (“new ways and methods”) is compared to Christ’s message of the “good news.” The contrast between the two is presented in terms of an opposition between different “ways of living,” each with its specific moral claims and political consequences. The opposition is not, the section argues, between logos and kratos, ethos and kratos, but rather between diverse ways of understanding logos and ethos. The final section argues that Machiavelli uses biblical, pagan, and Christian forms of religious symbols and metaphors in order to reevaluate the concepts of patria and amore. In so doing... (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia examines the life choices of two Jews who loved Christianity. Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, born into an ultra-Orthodox, nineteenth-century rabbinic dynasty in Lithuania, spent much of his life writing a Hebrew commentary on the Gospels in order to document and argue for the symmetry or symbiosis that he perceived between Judaism and Christianity. Oswald Rufeisen, from a twentieth-century secular Zionist background in Poland, converted to Catholicism during World War II, (...) became a monk, and attempted to immigrate to Israel as a Jew in 1958. Rufeisen, while permitted to move to Israel to join a Carmelite monastery in Haifa, was denied the right to immediate citizenship of Israel which the Law of Return guarantees to all bona fide Jews. And this particular Soloveitchik has largely been forgotten, given the limits of Jewish interest in the New Testament and of Christian attention to rabbinic literature. This article explores the complex and vexing questions that the careers of these two men raise about the elusive distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the Jewish religion and Jewish national identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Dialogue:Moving ForwardThomas Cattoi (bio) and Carol S. Anderson (bio)The San Francisco Bay Area is an interesting location in which to ponder Buddhist-Christian relations. The website UrbanDharma.org lists more than a hundred institutions affiliated with Buddhist organizations—a density higher than in the Beijing metropolitan area. Some of these centers have a clearly ethnic and denominational character, serving a predominantly immigrant population. Some, like many of the Tibetan organizations, function (...) as cultural centers but also attract a considerable Western clientele. Others, like the San Francisco Zen Center or Spirit Rock in Marin County, belong to the first wave of historical Buddhist centers established in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. A few more are trying to establish new forms of enculturated Buddhist practice that are more suited to Western sensitivities and are only loosely affiliated with the cultures of traditional Buddhist societies. At the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, alongside schools training Jesuit priests, Dominican friars, and Protestant ministers of various denominations, the Institute of Buddhist Studies prepares students from different walks of life to work as Buddhist chaplains in hospitals and educational institutions. Buddhism, in its various forms and manifestations, is no longer an exotic import from a little known “elsewhere,” but is part and parcel of the local spiritual landscape.For students and scholars practicing in such a diverse environment, it is perhaps difficult to imagine that for the greatest part of its history, most of Christendom was largely unaware of the very existence of the Buddhist tradition. While Clement of Alexandria and Jerome do mention Buddhism, and references to its practice can be found in the writings of medieval travelers such as Marco Polo, most European Christians lived in a world where the role of the religious “other” was played by Judaism and Islam. It was only in the early modern era, with the beginning of the European colonization of Asia, that non-Abrahamic religious traditions gradually entered the intellectual horizon of Western intellectuals and scholars. Around the year 1740, a French Jesuit named Jean-François Pons (1688–1752), otherwise remembered as a pioneer of Sanskrit studies in the West, came to the startling realization that many of the religious practices that missionaries and travelers had come across in regions as far apart as China, Japan, Nepal, and Mongolia were actually all parts of the same religious tradition. In his correspondence with his fellow Jesuits in France, he coined the [End Page vii] term Bauddhamatham—teaching of the Buddha—to refer to what would eventually be known as Buddhism. In the early years of the nineteenth century, many Sanskrit and Tibetan texts started to be catalogued and translated into the major European languages, bringing about the first encounter between Europe’s intellectual elites and this utterly foreign religious tradition.The nineteenth century also saw the beginning of a more existential engagement with the Buddhism tradition, albeit one that was limited to intellectual elites who were highly critical of institutional Christianity. In his work The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer found in Buddhism many echoes of his own philosophical insights. Many of the members of the Pāli Text Society, established in London in 1871, had rejected Christianity and thought they would find in Buddhism a moral framework in a society where the normativity of the Christian tradition had already started to be questioned. At the same time, we also see the beginning of the first comparative studies, where Buddhism and Christianity are compared from a speculative and doctrinal perspective. In 1880, Ernest de Bunsen claimed that if one made an exception for the crucifixion, many of the fundamental moral teachings of Buddhism and Christianity were virtually identical. This was just the beginning of a slew of similar studies.While the Christian churches were initially uninterested or outright skeptical about engaging in dialogue with non-Christian religious traditions, this attitude started to shift in the decades following the Second World War. The Second Vatican Council, for instance, marked an important shift in the Catholic Church’s attitude toward other religions. Before the 1960s, Catholic theology departments did not offer courses on other religious traditions or on interreligious dialogue... (shrink)

Why are religious tolerance and pluralism so difficult to achieve? Why is the often violent fundamentalist backlash against them so potent? Robert Erlewine looks to a new religion of reason for answers to these questions. Drawing on Enlightenment writers Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and Hermann Cohen, who placed Christianity and Judaism in tension with tolerance and pluralism, Erlewine finds a way to break the impasse, soften hostilities, and establish equal relationships with the Other. Erlewine’s recovery of a (...) religion of reason stands in contrast both to secularist critics of religion who reject religion for the sake of reason and to contemporary religious conservatives who eschew reason for the sake of religion. Monotheism and Tolerance suggests a way to deal with the intractable problem of religiously motivated and justified violence. (shrink)

The claim of the early church is one that the creative and saving power of God, embodied in the Lord Jesus, calls into being a community which is always trying to live out the implications of the divine refusal to accept cultural, ethnic, political, or other boundaries.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Buddhists and Christians Through Comparative Theology and SolidarityPaul O. IngramBuddhists and Christians Through Comparative Theology and Solidarity. By James L. Fredericks. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. xiv + 134 pp.This elegantly written book is not only a call to Christians to act in solidarity with persons of other faith traditions as well as persons professing no religious identity inmatters of social, economic, and ecological injustice. It is (...) also a challenge posed directly to Christians to create new forms of interreligious solidarity that can empower political and social solidarity with other religious communities. Of course, interreligious solidarity requires interreligious dialogue, but Fredericks seeks to [End Page 223] deepen the Christian theological underpinnings of interreligious dialogue by delineating a model of theology of religions that moves beyond the usual exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist models. He calls this model "comparative theology of religions."Given the fact of religious pluralism that necessitates living out one's own particular faith tradition surrounded by faithful persons who religiously dwell in other faith traditions, and given the emerging realities of globalization, no religious tradition can remain in isolation from any other religious tradition nor from the growing secularization that challenges persons of faith wherever persons of faith are found on this planet. The issue is not the emergence of a new global religion that will supercede Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism. Fredericks argues that the contrary is the case: as globalization and secularization erodes national, civic, and religious identity everywhere, interreligious solidarity that does not wash over the diversity of religious traditions becomes more important as a source of personal and communal identity, meaning, and purpose.Since the meaning of "solidarity" depends on how one understands the practice of interreligious dialogue and the theological models through which interreligious dialogue is practiced, Fredericks expends much effort describing and critiquing the exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist models of theology of religions. Strictly speaking, as Fredericks notes, "theology of religions" is not an issue for other religious traditions. Appropriating the words of Martin Luther, "this is most certainly true." Given the universal claims of Christian theology about the significance of the Incarnation and the notion that Christ is the only way to salvation, non-Christian traditions do not face the same exclusivist or inclusivist issues in their dialogues with other religious persons. This traditional Christian claim makes theology of religions a distinctively Christian problem.Fredericks's main criticism of exclusivist and inclusivist theologies are that both models are "replacement theologies" because (1) they either argue for the "replacement" of all non-Christian traditions with a form of Christian tradition, either Catholic or some form of Protestant tradition, or (2) they replace non-Christian traditions by assuming that what is good and true in these traditions is found most completely in Christian tradition. Much Protestant theology is exclusivist, and the current theological stance of Roman Catholicism is inclusivist. Both approaches are thoroughly nondialogical and thereby incapable of promoting Christian solidarity with non-Christians, and Fredericks's arguments in this regard are exceptionally cogent.But the trouble with pluralist theologies of religion, Fredericks argues, is that they "require Christians to recognize that Jesus is not the full revelation of God to the World. God is always more. Christians need to pay attention to other religious traditions in order to learn more of God" (p. 9). The idea of the incompleteness of God's revelation in Jesus doesn't make this revelation less true. But theological pluralism does make it difficult for Christians to be faithful to the depth and fullness of Christian faith and experience. In so doing, it fosters a debilitating theological relativism that often falsifies both Christian traditions and the non-Christian traditions with which one is engaged in dialogue. Given the relativist theology inherent in pluralist [End Page 224] theologies, it is difficult to see, Fredericks concludes, how theological pluralism can promote interreligious solidarity.So how should Christians understand the nature of religious pluralism and thereby enter into dialogue with faithful non-Christians in order to create religious solidarity, a sort of unity in diversity that aids all religious persons in confronting issues of injustice that are not religion-specific and haunt all religious human... (shrink)