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Open the Bible, and disability is everywhere. Moses stutters and
thinks himself unable to answer God's call. Isaac's blindness lets
his wife trick him into bestowing his blessing on his younger son.
Jesus heals the sick the blind, the paralyzed, and the possessed.
For centuries, these stories have been told and retold by
commentators who treat disability as misfortune, as a metaphor for
spiritual incapacity, or as a challenge to be overcome. Loving Our
Own Bones turns that perspective on its head. Drawing insights from
the hard-won wisdom of disabled folks who've forged difference into
fierce and luminous cultural dissent, Belser offers fresh and
unexpected readings of familiar biblical stories, showing how
disability wisdom can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with
the complexities of the flesh. She talks back to biblical
commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame,
challenging interpretations that demean disabled people and
diminish the vitality of disabled lives. And she shows how Sabbath
rest can be a powerful counter to the relentless demand for
productivity, an act of spiritual resistance in a culture that
makes work the signal measure of our worth. With both a lyrical
love of tradition and incisive political analysis, Belser braids
spiritual perspectives together with keen activist
insights-inviting readers to claim the power and promise of
spiritual dissent, to nourish their own souls through the
revolutionary art of radical self-love.
In Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, Julia Watts Belser examines early
Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Judea from the perspective
of the wounded body and the scarred land. Faced with stories
saturated with sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution,
disability, and bodily risk, Belser argues, our readings of
rabbinic narrative must wrestle with the brutal body costs of Roman
imperial domination. She brings disability studies, feminist
theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of
rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender,
sexuality, and the body are shaped in the shadow of empire.
Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud's longest sustained account of
the destruction of the Temple, Belser reveals Bavli Gittin's
distinctive sex and gender politics. While Palestinian tales
frequently castigate the 'wayward woman' for sexual transgressions
that imperil the nation, Bavli Gittin's stories resist portraying
women's sexuality as a cause of catastrophe. The Bavli's resistance
to Rome makes a critical difference. While other rabbinic texts
commonly inveigh against women's beauty as the cause of sexual sin,
Bavli Gittin's tales express a strikingly egalitarian discourse
that laments the vulnerability of the beautiful Jewish body before
the conqueror. Bavli Gittin's body politics, Belser maintains,
align with a significant theological reorientation. While most
early Jewish narratives link the destruction of the Temple to
communal sin, Bavli Gittin's account does not explain catastrophe
as divine chastisement. Instead of imagining God as the architect
of Jewish suffering, it evokes God's empathy with the subjugated
Jewish body. As it navigates the ruins of Jerusalem, Bavli Gittin
forges a sharp critique of empire. Its critical discourse aims to
pierce the power politics of Roman conquest, to protest the
brutality of imperial dominance, and to make plain the scar that
Roman violence leaves upon Jewish flesh.
In Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, Julia Watts Belser examines early
Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Judea. Faced with stories
of sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability,
and bodily risk, Belser argues, our readings of rabbinic narrative
must wrestle with the brutal body costs of Roman imperial
domination. She brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new
materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe,
revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender, sexuality, and the
body are shaped in the shadow of empire. Focusing on the Babylonian
Talmud's longest sustained account of the destruction of the
Temple, Belser reveals Bavli Gittin's distinctive sex and gender
politics. While Palestinian tales frequently castigate the 'wayward
woman' for sexual transgressions that imperil the nation, Bavli
Gittin's stories do not portray women's sexuality as a cause of
catastrophe. The Bavli's resistance to Rome makes a critical
difference. While other rabbinic texts commonly inveigh against
women's beauty as the cause of sexual sin, Bavli Gittin's tales
express a strikingly egalitarian discourse that laments the
vulnerability of the beautiful Jewish body before the conqueror.
Bavli Gittin's body politics, Belser maintains, align with a
significant theological reorientation. While most early Jewish
narratives link the destruction of the Temple to communal sin,
Bavli Gittin's account does not explain catastrophe as divine
chastisement. Instead of imagining God as the architect of Jewish
suffering, it evokes God's empathy with the subjugated Jewish body.
As it navigates the ruins of Jerusalem, Bavli Gittin forges a sharp
critique of empire. Its critical discourse aims to pierce the power
politics of Roman conquest, to protest the brutality of imperial
dominance, and to make plain the scar that Roman violence leaves
upon Jewish flesh.
This book borrows from the intellectual labor of queer theory in
order to unsettle-or "queer"-the discourses of "religion" and
"science," and, by extension, the "science and religion discourse."
Drawing intellectual and social cues from works by influential
theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick,
chapters in this volume converge on at least three common features
of queer theory. First, queer theory challenges givens that on
occasion still undergird religiously and scientifically informed
ways of thinking. Second, it takes embodiment seriously. Third,
this engagement inevitably generates new pathways for thinking
about how religious and scientific "truths" matter. These three
features ultimately lend support to critical investigations into
the meanings of "science" and "religion," and the relationships
between the two.
Rabbinic tales of drought, disaster, and charismatic holy men
illuminate critical questions about power, ethics, and ecology in
Jewish late antiquity. Through a sustained reading of the
Babylonian Talmud's tractate on fasts in response to drought, this
book shows how Bavli Ta'anit challenges Deuteronomy's claim that
virtue can assure abundance and that misfortune is an unambiguous
sign of divine rebuke. Employing a new method for analyzing lengthy
talmudic narratives, Julia Watts Belser traces complex strands of
aggadic dialectic to show how Bavli Ta'anit's redactors articulate
a strikingly self-critical theological and ethical discourse. Bavli
Ta'anit castigates rabbis for misuse of power, exposing the limits
of their perception and critiquing prevailing obsessions with
social status. But it also celebrates the possibilities of
performative perception - the power of an adroit interpreter to
transform events in the world and interpret crisis in a way that
draws forth blessing.
Rabbinic tales of drought, disaster, and charismatic holy men
illuminate critical questions about power, ethics, and ecology in
Jewish late antiquity. Through a sustained reading of the
Babylonian Talmud's tractate on fasts in response to drought, this
book shows how Bavli Ta'anit challenges Deuteronomy's claim that
virtue can assure abundance and that misfortune is an unambiguous
sign of divine rebuke. Employing a new method for analyzing lengthy
talmudic narratives, Julia Watts Belser traces complex strands of
aggadic dialectic to show how Bavli Ta'anit's redactors articulate
a strikingly self-critical theological and ethical discourse. Bavli
Ta'anit castigates rabbis for misuse of power, exposing the limits
of their perception and critiquing prevailing obsessions with
social status. But it also celebrates the possibilities of
performative perception - the power of an adroit interpreter to
transform events in the world and interpret crisis in a way that
draws forth blessing.
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