How the rabbis of the Talmud transformed everything into a legal question-and Jewish law into a way of thinking and talking about everything Though typically translated as "Jewish law," the term halakhah is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its many detailed rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim that the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God-a claim no country makes of its law. In this panoramic book, Chaim Saiman traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. In the multifaceted world of halakhah where everything is law, law is also everything, and even laws that serve no practical purpose can, when properly studied, provide surprising insights into timeless questions about the very nature of human existence. What does it mean for legal analysis to connect humans to God? Can spiritual teachings remain meaningful and at the same time rigidly codified? Can a modern state be governed by such law? Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this book shows how halakhah is not just "law" but an entire way of thinking, being, and knowing.

Frank Brennan has been a long time advocate for human rights and social justice in Australia. This collection of essays brings together some of his major addresses and writings on justice in the Catholic Church and in Australian society. Placing the individual's formed and informed conscience as the centre piece in any work for justice, he surveys recent developments in the Catholic Church including the handling of child sexual abuse claims and the uplifting effect of the papacy of Francis, the first Jesuit pope. He then applies Catholic social teaching and the jurisprudence of human rights to contested issues like the separation of powers and the right of religious freedom, and to the claims of diverse groups including Aborigines, asylum seekers, the dying, and same sex couples. At every step, he is there in the public square amplifying that still, small voice of conscience, especially the voice of those who are marginalised.

Friedrich Nietzsche claimed to be a psychologist. This claim is substantiated in his criticism of religion. In this book, Jan-Olav Henriksen provides new perspectives on Nietzsche's contribution to such criticism by applying elements from attachment theory and self-psychology. The result is that Nietzsche's insights into the problematic elements in religion point beyond what he was able to articulate based on the psychological resources available to him. Henriksen sheds new light on the psychological dimensions in Nietzsche's individualism, his understanding of God, morality, metaphysics and emotions, and demonstrates how Nietzsche's criticism of religion is rooted in both psychological splitting and a profound loss of the orientational resources religion provided in his childhood.

Does rationality, the intellectual bedrock of all science, apply to the study of religion? Religion, arguably the most subjective area of human behaviour, has particular challenges associated with its study. Attracting crowd-healers, conjurers, the pious and the prophetic alongside comparativists and sceptics, it excites opinions and generalisations whilst seldom explicitly staking out the territory for the discussions in which it partakes. Increasingly, scholars argue that religious study needs to define and critique its own field, and to distinguish itself from theology and other non-objective disciplines. Yet how can rational techniques be applied to beliefs and states of mind regarded by some as beyond the scope of human reason? Can these be made empirically testable, or comparable and replicable within academic communities? Can science explicate religion without reducing it to mere superstition, or redefine its truth in some empirical but meaningful way?;Featuring contributions from leading international experts including Donald Wiebe, Roger Trigg and Michael Pye, "Rationality and the Study of Religion" gets under the surface of the religious studies discipline to expose the ideologies beneath. Reopening debate in a neglected yet philosophically significant field, it questions the role of rationality in religious anthropology, natural history and anti-scientific theologies, with implications not only for supposedly objective disciplines but for our deepest attitudes to personal experience. It is 'interesting and important.

This groundbreaking book was among the most important of those that presented the teachings of Maimonides, as represented by his many published works, as a unified whole, thus bringing about a renaissance in the study of this seminal scholar. The author states, in his original introduction, that "the spirit which animated [Maimonides'] mind and pervades his writings is as much needed now as ever before." Academic Studies Press is proud to make this important work once again available in printed form.

There are many ways of living religiously informed ethical Muslim lives In this book, the author presents two important accounts, one by the 9th century moral pedagogue, al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 857) and the other by 20th century Kurdish Quran scholar, Said Nursi (d. 1960), of what the psychic states and moral subjectivity of an authentic, ideal Muslim ought to look like in everyday life. The book analyzes their accounts of the nature of and the discursive practices implicated in the self-production, of what the author calls ideal Muslim subjects. The book draws on Foucault's insights about ethics and the practices of self-care, to examine Muslim discourses in a way that enriches contemporary discussions about identity, individuality, community, authority, agency and virtue in the fields of religious ethics, Islamic studies and Islamic ethics. The author deepens our understanding of the fluidity and fragility of both the more familiar obligation-centered ethics in Islam and the less familiar, belief-centered mode of Muslim ethical life.

Freedom and Law offers a provocative new view of the relationship between human desire, the production of knowledge, and conceptions of power by developing a nonpolemical account of divine law. Where recent trends in political theology have insisted upon the antagonistic nature of the law, this book presents the paradigm-altering power of a discourse in the nexus between law and freedom. It demonstrates how this nexus catapults religious thought into a free and powerful engagement with nonreligious political, ethical, and social positions. Freedom and Law challenges a contemporary wave of scholarship, including the work of Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Zizek, that identifies Jewish law as the originary soucre of polemic between nations and therefore as historically responsible for the exceptionalism that undergirds contemporary conflict. By contrast, Freedom and Law argues that only in an account of revelatory law can divine freedom and human freedom be thought of without contradiction. The first part analyzes the logic of exceptionalism. In the second part, the author argues that one cannot invoke a doctrine of election without rigorous scrutiny of texts that portray an electing God and an elected people. Once we scrutinize these texts, the character of freedom and law within the divine-human relationship shows itself to be different from that found in exceptionalist logics. The third and final part examines the impact of the logic of the law on Jewish-Christian apologetics. Rather than require that one defend one's position to a nonbeliever, this logic situates all epistemological justification within the order or freedom of God. If the condition of the possibility of my claim is the reality of divine freedom, such freedom also justifies the possibility of another's claim. In a significant contribution to the post-ecclesiastical reengagement between religion, critical theory, and the political, Freedom and Law introduces new categories of knowledge and action into Jewish and Christian thinking, unbound by the dialectics of desire that has dominated the discourse of both traditions for centuries. It shows how thinking of law and freedom together may now enable Judaism and Christianity to engage in a historically self-conscious and nonrelativistic relation to each other and to nonbelievers.

The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin's corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program - "to transfer the crisis into the heart of language" or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena - requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin's favorite expressions.

Song-Chong Lee's Ham Sok Hon's Ssial Philosophy for a Cosmopolitan Vision offers an introduction to the philosophy of Ham Sok Hon ( ), an iconic figure in the intellectual and political history of modern Korea, and a discussion of the contributions of his ssial ( /seeds, people) philosophy to cosmopolitanism. Known as Gandhi of Han'guk, Ham (1901-1989) was at the epicenter of a series of tumultuous political events in Korea and played a pioneering role in progressive social activism, including the independence movement, promotion of nationalist education, protests against military regimes, and pietistic, religious liberalism. According to Lee, Ham developed his own syncretic, authentic philosophy of ssial and applied it to his understanding and assessment of theology, history, politics, and even international relations. His syncretism culminated at his anthropology of ssial and his expanded notion of community. Lee argues that Ham's ssial philosophy, which reconstructed the citizen's identity as an active agent for political progress, led him to defy the excessively parochial nationalism, romanticized patriotism, and indoctrinated religiosity with which he believed the whole society was infatuated during the mid-twentieth century--and ultimately to advocate for a cosmopolitan community.

Where does our conscience come from? How reliable is it? In the West conscience has been relied upon for two thousand years as a judgement that distinguishes right from wrong. It has effortlessly moved through every period division and timeline between the ancient, medieval, and modern. The Romans identified it, the early Christians appropriated it, and Reformation Protestants and loyal Catholics relied upon its advice and admonition. Today it is embraced with equal conviction by non-religious and religious alike. Considering its deep historical roots and exploring what it has meant to successive generations, Paul Strohm highlights why this particularly European concept deserves its reputation as 'one of the prouder Western contributions to human rights and human dignity throughout the world.' Using examples from popular culture including the Disney classic Pinocchio, as well as examples from contemporary politics, he explores the work of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Aquinas, to show how and why conscience remains a motivating and important principle in the contemporary world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The forgotten truths of Celtic Christianity provide a portal into a spiritual way of experiencing the world. The Celtic Christians beheld the world around them and perceived the divine life of God as upholding every aspect of the material universe. Their prayers and poems, their liturgies and theological interpretations give Christians a sense of faith that is confident in a merciful and infinitely creative, healing God. In this introduction to Celtic Christian spirituality, Mary Earle presents primary texts from the Celtic Christian tradition—selections from the works of Pelagius, Eriugena and St. Patrick, as well as prayers and poems from Wales, the Outer Hebrides and Ireland. These essential writings direct humanity to read the "book of creation" as well as the Bible, and call us to remember that “matter matters.� Earle's engaging facing-page commentary explores how faithful Christians and spiritual seekers can take inspiration from this lively tradition’s ways of embodying and living the gospel. Topics include: Creation Daily life and work Incarnation Pilgrimage Blessing Social justice Prayer

Tracing its history from Moses Mendelssohn to today, Alan Levenson explores the factors that shaped what is the modern Jewish Bible and its centrality in Jewish life today. The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible explains how Jewish translators, commentators, and scholars made the Bible a keystone of Jewish life in Germany, Israel and America. Levenson argues that German Jews created a religious Bible, Israeli Jews a national Bible, and American Jews an ethnic one. In each site, scholars wrestled with the demands of the non-Jewish environment and their own indigenous traditions, trying to balance fidelity and independence from the commentaries of the rabbinic and medieval world.