Leora Batnitzky Research Articles

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law

The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law

Jewish Legal Theories: Writings on State, Religion, and Morality. Edited by Leora Batnitzky and Yonatan Y. Brafman. Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017. Pp xiii + 260. $40.00.

Jewish Legal Theories: Writings on State, Religion, and Morality. Edited by Leora Batnitzky and Yonatan Y. Brafman. Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017. Pp xiii + 260. $40.00.

Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism

Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism

This Power Which Is Not One: Queer Temporality, Jewish Difference, and the Concept of Religion in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem

This Power Which Is Not One:Queer Temporality, Jewish Difference, and the Concept of Religion in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem Larisa Reznik (bio) Of all the various ways to describe Jewish difference in Western modernity—cultural, ethnic, national, racial, and so on—the designation "religious" is particularly vexed. In the context of the rise of the nation-state in Europe, religion was, we are often told, a way for Jews to become just like their Protestant neighbors. In the context of Jewish immigration to the United States, framing Judaism in terms of religion, rather than race or ethnicity, was a way for Jews to benefit from white privilege by distancing themselves from black Americans and other racially and ethnically stigmatized groups.1 In both the European and the U.S. case, parsing Jewish difference in terms of "religion" proved to be the least threatening to the status quo. Therefore, many popular and scholarly assessments regard the translation of Judaism and Jewishness into the idiom of "religion" as the decidedly modern wound of assimilation. These assessments are also aided by the widely circulating master narrative in the academic study of religion, which holds that "religion" is itself a modern, Protestant concept that, via colonialism, exported its categories globally and collected back its own products in the form of "world religions." Knowledge production about the colonized other, attendant to missionary activity and colonial governance, entailed extracting from previously undifferentiated spheres of life some sui generis essence called "religion," deciding what rituals, gods, "sacred" texts, affective dispositions, social arrangements, and forms of authority will belong to it and be prohibited by it and, in this way, shaping disparate forms of life around the globe in the image of Christian Europe. Aaron Hughes, for instance, drawing on a body of literature in religious studies, concludes that "religion" is "predicated on a set of largely Western and Christocentric categories that are subsequently retrofitted onto other cultures and earlier times."2 For this reason, the word "invention" often appears in book and article titles aimed at explaining how particular practices in specific regions at certain historical junctures came to be discussed in terms of "religion." If book and article titles in religious studies alone are any indication, accounting for the "invention" of religion is the gift that keeps on giving.3 [End Page 143] In her recent book, How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky offers one plausible genealogy of modern Jewish thought, articulated around the question of whether "religion" is an appropriate idiom for Judaism. Batnitzky argues that Moses Mendelssohn essentially "invents" Judaism as a "religion," thereby setting in motion a series of variations on and oppositions to the project of Judaism becoming a religion.4 Batnitzky posits Mendelssohn's presentation of Judaism as a point of rupture—a conceptual fault line—that simultaneously works as a periodizing gesture. Framed as the inauguration of the "modern," Mendelssohn's now classic eighteenth-century text, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, becomes a site for exploring questions and anxieties about the continuities and discontinuities between the "modern," what came before, and a range of contested possibilities for what is yet to come. Like many scholars engaged in theorizing this distinctly modern and Western concept, Batnitzky sees "religion" as an artifact of the rise of the nation-state. Removed from the domain of political power, "religion" now describes private, disembodied, apolitical, and individual belief.5 At times, Batnitzky suggests that this decidedly modern concept was not organic to any tradition's self-understanding and had to be "invented" as much for various forms of Christianity as for its others. She acknowledges that the question of what belongs to religion was contested even among Protestants, thereby potentially complicating even religion's monolithically "Protestant" credentials.6 Batnitzky also notes that Judaism is not unique in its incongruity with the conceptual category "religion." According to her, when we look at headscarf controversies in France or U.S. evangelical Christian opposition to gay marriage, we are confronted with a bad fit between our decidedly modern expectations of "religion" and the various communities that have not separated "religion" from domains of power such as law, science, and politics.7 While Batnitzky grants that...

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015 Compiled by Mike Witcombe What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2015, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth’s texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions. BOOKS The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Basu, Ann. States of Trial—Manhood in Philip Roth’s America. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Koy, Christopher E., Ed. “The Worldliness of Philip Roth.” Special issue of Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 25:49 (2015). Print. BOOK CHAPTERS Aarons, Vicki. “The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. [End Page 111] Batnitzky, Leora. “Beyond Theodicy? Joban Themes in Philip Roth’s Nemesis.” The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics. Eds. Leora Batnitzky and Ilona Pardes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. 213-24. Print. Budick, Emily Miller. “Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me.” The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. 19-36. Print. Furst, Lilian R. “Ritualized Bellyaching: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.” Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015. 57-70. Print. Löffler, Philipp. “‘A Singular Act of Invention’: Storytelling, Pluralism, and Philip Roth’s American Trilogy.” Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015. 97-126. Print. Mosher, Paul W. and Jeffrey Berman. “Angry Acts and Counteracts in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 82-104. Print. _______. “The Angry Act: The Psychoanalyst’s Breach of Confidentiality in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 63-81. Print. Osmanović, Sabina. “Dealing with Evanescence: The Motif of Old Age and the Crisis of Meaning in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal.” Mapping the World of Anglo-American Studies at the Turn of the Century. Eds. Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević and Marija Krivokapić. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. 175-81. Print. Pozorski, Aimee. “American Jewish Life Writing, Illness and the Ethics of Innovation.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. Scanlan, Margaret. “Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History After 9/11.” Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Eds. John Duvall and Robert Marzec. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 168-93. Print. Schreier, Benjamin. “Why Jews Aren’t Normal: The Unrepresentable Future of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York UP, 2015. 149-84. Print. Segal, Lynne. “The Circus of (male) Ageing: Philip Roth and the Perils of Masculinity.” Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism. Ed. Stephen Frosh. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 87-104. Print. Tandon, Bharat. “Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing.” Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical. Ed. Fiona Green. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Web. JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS Anténe, Petr. “Racial Conflicts in the Campus Novel of the Early 2000s: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and...

Michael Wyschogrod's Messianic Zionism

This essay presents an integrated account of Michael Wyschogrod's Zionism as a function of his broader theological anthropology, eschatology, and carnal interpretation of Israel's election. Against Leora Batnitzky, I show that Wyschogrod's Zionism, while definitively messianic, is decidedly not fanatical or fundamentalist. Against Meir Soloveichik, I show that Wyschogrod has maintained this non-fanatical messianism consistently throughout his career, and so his pacific political prescriptions are organically at one with his vigorous calls for Jewish sovereignty over the land.

Book Review: How Judaism Became a Religion. An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought, written by Leora Batnitzky

Book Review: How Judaism Became a Religion. An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought, written by Leora Batnitzky

No religion without idolatry: Mendelssohn's Jewish Enlightenment

Moses Mendelssohn (1725 1786) is considered the foremost representative of Jewish Enlightenment. In No Religion without Idolatry, Gideon Freudenthal offers a novel interpretation of Mendelssohn s general philosophy discusses for the first time Mendelssohn s semiotic interpretation of idolatry in his Jerusalem and in his Hebrew biblical commentary. Mendelssohn emerges from this study as an original philosopher, not a shallow popularizer of rationalist metaphysics, as he is sometimes portrayed. Of special lasting value is his semiotic theory of idolatry.From a semiotic perspective, both idolatry enlightenment are necessary constituents of religion. Idolatry ascribes to religious symbols an intrinsic value: enlightenment maintains that symbols are conventional merely signify religious content but do not share its properties value. Without enlightenment, religion degenerates to fetishism; without idolatry it turns into philosophy frustrates religious experience. Freudenthal demonstrates that in Mendelssohn s view, Judaism is the optimal religious synthesis. It consists of transient ceremonies of a living script. Its ceremonies are symbols, but they are not permanent objects that could be venerated. Jewish ceremonies thus provide a religious experience but frustrate fetishism. Throughout the book, Freudenthal fruitfully contrasts Mendelssohn's views on religion philosophy with those of his contemporary critic opponent, Salomon Maimon. No Religion without Idolatry breaks new ground in Mendelssohn studies. It will interest students scholars in philosophy of religion, Judaism, semiotics.In this lucid provocative study, Gideon Freudenthal offers an original compelling reading of Mendelssohn as well as a defense of the possibility of religious rationalism more generally. This book is not only an excellent contribution to a growing body of scholarship on Mendelssohn early modern philosophy, but it also significantly sharpens advances contemporary conversations about the relations between religion reason. Leora Batnitzky, Princeton UniversityIn this masterful study, Gideon Freudenthal demonstrates how Mendelssohn s philosophy, including his philosophy of religion, is grounded in semiotics. The result is a landmark work that not only successfully challenges standard interpretations of Mendelssohn s 'enlightened Judaism' its alleged inconsistency but also effectively invites reconsideration of the very possibility of 'religion without idolatry.' Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Boston UniversityIn focusing on Mendelssohn's 'semiotics of idolatry, ' Gideon Freudenthal writes as a philosopher fully at home in multiple traditions: contemporary philosophy, eighteenth-century philosophy, Jewish biblical exegesis, comparative religion. The result is a systematic penetrating study, based on the Hebrew as well as the German texts, that engages Mendelssohn on perhaps the most critical issue of his understanding of religion with unprecedented philosophical rigor imagination. David Sorkin, City University of New York Graduate Center

Idolatry and the Civil Covenant of Photography: On the Practice of Exhibiting Images of Suffering, Degradation, and Death

AbstractExhibiting perpetrator photographs of suffering and death presents a series of curatorial problems for museums and galleries. Unlike photojournalist images taken to inform a social conscience, the initial creation and circulation of such photographs have historically been implicated in the violence they depict. Beyond skepticism as to photography’s capacity to arouse a moral impulse, exhibitions of perpetrator photographs have been criticized for promoting voyeurism and extending suffering through the reiteration of images of human degradation. I consider how a problem central to Jewish theology might speak to such curatorial concerns, specifically the question of what constitutes the practice of idolatry. In this context I explore issues related to the ethics of visuality, developing the implications of Leora Batnitzky’s reading of Franz Rosenzweig’s cultural writings for my own concerns regarding the museological practice of public history.

INTRODUCING THE WORK OF PETER OCHS

AbstractPeter Ochs’ work offers a rehabilitation of the wisdom tradition celebrated by rabbinic Judaism. While Jewish philosophy, long occupied by the particular names and categories of the given order, has neglected the deepest insights of the rabbinic appreciation of wisdom, Ochs’ work recovers wisdom as a metaphysically imaginative and pragmatically effective exercise of reasoning. The four articles offered in this symposium on the work of Peter Ochs by David Lamberth, James K. A. Smith, Nicholas Adams and Leora Batnitzky, together with Peter Ochs’ response and Steven Kepnes’ conclusion, offer a striking illustration of the reach and depth of Ochs’ recovery of wisdom. This reach extends but is not limited to a ‘new thinking’ and agenda for philosophical theology applied to its specific areas of concern, including the relationship between philosophy and theology, the nature of religious studies, and the practice of Scriptural Reasoning.

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. By Leora Batnitzky. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 304p. $80.00. In recent years, Leo Strauss has achieved a posthumous success de scandal as the (purported) philosophical architect of neoconservatism. Strauss's works have been scrutinized by detractors and partisans to determine whether he bears responsibility for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Amidst the clamor, however, more measured assessments are starting to emerge. Today, the most provocative appraisals of his work come from scholars in Jewish studies, as Leora Batnitzky's fascinating book attests. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, Batnitzky seeks to establish Strauss's contribution to modern Jewish thought, but her argument for his importance as a Jewish thinker also reframes the vexed question of his legacy for American politics. She offers a nonpolemical, non-Straussian defense of Leo Strauss. In many ways, her portrait of Strauss as a philosophical skeptic and political moderate resonates with that of Steven B. Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (2006). However, Batnitzky departs from Smith (and, indeed, from most readers of Strauss) when she hails Strauss as the most ardent philosophical defender of Jewish revelation in the modern period.

Leo Strauss and the Theological Dimension of Political Philosophy: Four Readings

These four accounts of how Leo Strauss (1899-1973) understood political philosophy call attention to what he thought about biblical revelation. Each goes its own way to a considerable extent. According to Steven B. Smith, Strauss turns out to have been an atheist. According to Kim Sorensen, on the other hand, Strauss's reflections on Machiavelli indicate his philosophical openness to biblical revelation. Then again, according to Heinrich Meier, Strauss's confrontation with biblical revelation was at the heart of his under standing and defense of political philosophy. Finally, according to Leora Batnitzky, Strauss had his doubts about biblical revelation as construed by modem Jewish thinkers in particular, although or because he understood it better than they tend to. That there should be such disagreement among these four authors seems traceable in part to Strauss's own warning of a basic tension between biblical revelation and political philosophy-between Jerusalem and Athens, as he called them. The following remarks compare what each of these four authors has to say about that tension.

REVIEWS

Book reviewed: Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered by Leora Batnitzky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) x + 281 pp. Reviewed by Charles T. Mathewes Department of Religious Studies University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904‐4126 SA Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition by Hans Boersma (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004) + 288 pp. Reviewed by Gladstone H. Stevens, S.S. St. Mary's Seminary and University 5400 Roland Ave. Baltimore, MD 21210 USA The Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason by Oliver Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) xi + 210 pp. Reviewed by Matthew Levering Ave Maria University 1025 Commons Circle Naples, Florida 34119 USA Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity by Larry W. Hurtado (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003) xxii + 745 pp. Reviewed by Stephen Fowl Department of Theology Loyola College in Maryland 4501 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21210 USA Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II by Tracey Rowland (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) xiv + 226 pp. Reviewed by Joseph Wawrykow Department of Theology University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 USA Spinoza's Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason by Nancy K. Levene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) xxii + 256pp. Reviewed by Martin Kavka Department of Religion Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306‐1520 USA Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or How to Live in a Less than Perfect Nation by Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Equinox, 2005) xi + 123 pp. Reviewed by Stefan Skrimshire 75 Rockdove Avenue Hulme Manchester M15 5EH UK Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture by Timothy Gorringe (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004) vi + 283 pp. Reviewed by J. Matthew Ashley Department of Theology University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA Flannery O’Connor and the Christ‐Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004) xii + 272 pp. Reviewed by Frederick C. Bauerschmidt Department of Theology Loyola College 4501 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21210 USA

Encounters with Levinas by Thomas Trezise (review)

1120 Reviews whereas the materialists of Documents insist on art-as-process. Adamowicz addresses Aragon's fractured narrative of collage (1923-75), exposing the ideological reading that led him to condemn Ernst's collages as frivolous, and to vaunt John Heartfield's satirical photomontages fortheir collectivist political freight.Adamowicz's critique of the erasure of collage in Aragon's slavish socio-realist writings of 1935-60 opens the way for a corrective engagement with Ernst's mesmerically poetic assault on establishment values. The study concludes with a consideration of the post-war struggle to reaffirmSurrealism under pressure from abstract experimentalism. As Breton's voice falters, a new generation deploys esoteric discourse to chart the processes of lyrical abstraction in painting: in this respect the metaphoric texts of the 1950s reprise the rhetorical strategies of the 1930s. This admirably paced study, combining close read? ing and lucid synthesis, offersan incisive examination of textual figurations that lose sight?product ively,provocatively?ofthe art works that were their catalyst. University of Wales Swansea Susan Harrow Encounters with Levinas. Ed. by Thomas Trezise. (Yale French Studies, 104) Lon? don: Yale University Press. 2004. 146 pp. ?15. ISBN 0-300-10216-x. In the useful but tantalizingly short 'Editor's Preface' to this collection of essays Thomas Trezise ascribes Levinas's now uncontested status and influence to the fact that the ethical relation to the other raises more questions than it answers. Trezise goes on to outline some of these questions (p. 2). Does Levinas's philosophical dis? course essentialize the very other whose singularity he wishes to champion? Might not discourses other than philosophy be more appropriate to the preservation of alterity ? How can the purely dyadic encounter of self and other be reconciled with issues such as justice and politics? And might not Levinas's perceived originality derive at least in part from the work of other thinkers, or from long-standing religious, philosophical, or cultural traditions? Rather than offering direct or comprehensive responses to these pertinent questions, the following essays are conceived as a series of encounters which explore some of the intellectual contexts and philosophical resonance of Levinas's work. Interesting and accomplished essays analyse Levinas's defence of subjectivity and trace its Cartesian roots (Leora Batnitzky), unravel the importance of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky in his work (Samuel Moyn and Alain Toumayan respectively), and discuss his equivocations on the image and figuration (Philippe Crignon). If there is no startling new reading of Levinas in these essays, they nevertheless offernumerous fresh insights into aspects of his writing which have been misunderstood or neglected. Of the remaining essays, Paul Ricoeur's discussion of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence is already published in French, though it was certainly worthwhile to make his typically courteous but probing engagement available to anglophone scholars; and Edith Wyschogrod breaks new ground by confronting Levinas's thought with recent developments in genetic theory. Most ofthe contributors are happy to correct or criticize Levinas on occasion, but easily the most overt and challenging attack comes in Luce Irigaray's essay, 'What Other are We Talking About?', which builds upon and clarifies her chapter on Levinas mAn Ethics of Sexual Difference. She vigorously distances herself from Levinas's work, accusing him of understanding subjectivity in exclusively masculine terms and thereby silently appropriating the feminine other despite his desire to avoid fusion or pos? session. Irigaray's reading may be limited by the fact that it is based here primarily on the lectures from the 1940s published as Time and the Other, rather than taking account of Levinas's later self-revisions in, for example, Otherwise than Being or Be? yond Essence. Even so, her lively, provocative engagement is at least as much in the MLRy 100.4, 2005 1121 spirit of Levinasian encounter as the more respectful excavations of Levinas's thought and contexts, and it is to be regretted that Levinas was unwilling to respond in kind during his lifetime. In summary, this is a varied collection of essays, all of which make valuable contributions to the now massive body of secondary material on Levinas. Royal Holloway, University of London Colin Davis Andrei Makine: la rencontrede I'Est et...

Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered. Leora Batnitzky

<i>Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered</i>. Leora Batnitzky

Christianity in Jewish terms

Preface Acknowledgments A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity Abbreviations 1. Introduction: What to Seek and What to Avoid in Jewish-Christian Dialogue, David Novak 2. Christian-Jewish Interactions over the Ages, Robert Chazan 3. The Shoah and the Legacy of Anti-Semitism Judaism, Christianity, and Partnership After the Twentieth Century, Irving Greenberg, Christian Theology After the Shoah, Christopher M. Leighton, 4. God The God of Jews and Christians, Peter Ochs, A Jewish View of the Christian God: Some Cautionary and Hopeful Remarks, David Ellenson, God as Trinitarian: A Christian Response to Peter Ochs, David Tracy, 5. Scripture Searching the Scriptures: Jews, Christians, and the Book, Michael A. Signer, The Writings and Reception of Philo of Alexandria, Hindy Najman, Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Case Study, George Lindbeck, 6. Commandment Mitsvah, David Novak, Another Jewish View of Ethics, Christian and Jewish, Elliot N. Dorff, Christian Ethics in Jewish Terms: A Response to David Novak, Stanley Hauerwas, 7. Israel Judaism and Christianity: Covenants of Redemption, Irving Greenberg, Israel, Judaism, and Christianity , David Fox Sandmel, Israel and the Church: A Christian Response to Irving Greenberg's Covenantal Pluralism, R. Kendall Soulen, 8. Worship Jewish and Christian Liturgy, Lawrence A. Hoffman, Liturgy and Sensory Experience, Ruth Langer, Christian Worship: An Affair of Things as well as Words, Robert Wilken, 9. Suffering On the Suffering of God's Chosen: Christian Views in Jewish Terms, Leora Batnitzky, Suspicions of Suffering, Robert Gibbs , The Meaning and Value of Suffering: A Christian Response to Leora Batnitzky, John C. Cavadini, 10. Embodiment Judaism and Incarnation: The Imaginal Body of God, Elliot R. Wolfson The Christian Doctrine of the Incarnation, Randi Rashkover, Embodiment and Incarnation: A Response to Elliot Wolfson, Susan A. Ross, 11. Redemption How Ought a Jew View

MEDICAL-SURGICAL NURSING

How should we understand religion, and what place should it hold, in an age in which metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions which supported traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is not clear how this 'end of metaphysics' should be understood, nor what implications it ought to have for our understanding of religion. At the same time there is renewed interest in the sacred and the divine in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literature, history, anthropology, and cultural studies. In this volume, leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the space which this decline has opened for non-theological understandings of religion. The contributors include Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Gianni Vattimo, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin, John Caputo, Adriaan Peperzak, Leora Batnitzky, and Mark Wrathall.