Download or read book God and Humanity in Auschwitz written by Donald J. Dietrich and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God and Humanity in Auschwitz synthesizes the findings of research developed over the last thirty years on the rise of anti-Semitism in our civilization. Donald J. Dietrich sees the Holocaust as a case study of how prejudice has been theologically enculturated. He suggests how it may be controlled by reducing aggressive energy before it becomes overwhelming. Dietrich studies the recent responses of Christian theologians to the Holocaust and the Jewish theological response to questions concerning God's covenant with Israel, which were provoked by Auschwitz. Social science has dealt with the psychosocial dynamics that have supported genocide and helps explain how ordinary persons can produce extraordinary evil. Dietrich shows how this research, combined with theological analyses, can help reconfigure theology itself. Such an approach may serve to help dissolve anti-Semitism, to aid in constructing such positive values as respect for human dignity, and to point the way to restricting future outbreaks of genocide. God and Humanity in Auschwitz surveys which religious factors created a climate that permitted the Holocaust. It also illuminates what social science has to tell us about developing a strategy that, when institutionally implemented, can channel our energies away from sanctioned murder toward a more compassionate society. The book has proven to be an essential resource for theologians, sociologists, historians, and political theorists.
Download or read book God and Humanity in Auschwitz written by Donald Dietrich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God and Humanity in Auschwitz synthesizes the findings of research developed over the last thirty years on the rise of anti-Semitism in our civilization. Donald J. Dietrich sees the Holocaust as a case study of how prejudice has been theologically enculturated. He suggests how it may be controlled by reducing aggressive energy before it becomes overwhelming. Dietrich studies the recent responses of Christian theologians to the Holocaust and the Jewish theological response to questions concerning God's covenant with Israel, which were provoked by Auschwitz. Social science has dealt with the psychosocial dynamics that have supported genocide and helps explain how ordinary persons can produce extraordinary evil. Dietrich shows how this research, combined with theological analyses, can help reconfigure theology itself. Such an approach may serve to help dissolve anti-Semitism, to aid in constructing such positive values as respect for human dignity, and to point the way to restricting future outbreaks of genocide. God and Humanity in Auschwitz surveys which religious factors created a climate that permitted the Holocaust. It also illuminates what social science has to tell us about developing a strategy that, when institutionally implemented, can channel our energies away from sanctioned murder toward a more compassionate society. The book has proven to be an essential resource for theologians, sociologists, historians, and political theorists.
Download or read book God and Humanity in Auschwitz written by Donald J. Dietrich and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Trial of God written by Elie Wiesel and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod) A Play by Elie Wiesel Translated by Marion Wiesel Introduction by Robert McAfee Brown Afterword by Matthew Fox Where is God when innocent human beings suffer? This drama lays bare the most vexing questions confronting the moral imagination. Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place in the aftermath of a pogrom. Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer. The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: “Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.” Inspired and challenged by this play, Christian theologians Robert McAfee Brown and Matthew Fox, in a new Introduction and Afterword, join Elie Wiesel in the search for faith in a world where God is silent.
Download or read book Humanity in God s Image written by Claudia Welz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study which suggests human beings are created in the image of an invisible God, an idea that can only be conceptualized in the imagination.
Download or read book God After Auschwitz written by Zachary Braiterman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-23 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of technology-enhanced mass death in the twentieth century, argues Zachary Braiterman, has profoundly affected the future shape of religious thought. In his provocative book, the author shows how key Jewish theologians faced the memory of Auschwitz by rejecting traditional theodicy, abandoning any attempt to justify and vindicate the relationship between God and catastrophic suffering. The author terms this rejection "Antitheodicy," the refusal to accept that relationship. It finds voice in the writings of three particular theologians: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim. This book is the first to bring postmodern philosophical and literary approaches into conversation with post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Drawing on the work of Mieke Bal, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, and others, Braiterman assesses how Jewish intellectuals reinterpret Bible and Midrash to re-create religious thought for the age after Auschwitz. In this process, he provides a model for reconstructing Jewish life and philosophy in the wake of the Holocaust. His work contributes to the postmodern turn in contemporary Jewish studies and today's creative theology.
Download or read book Fire in the Ashes written by David Patterson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, pondering the enormity of that event. In this book, a group of Jewish and Christian scholars, members of he Pastora Goldner Symposium, attempt to understand divine justice in the face of evil.
Download or read book Facing Auschwitz written by Arlen Fowler and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2003 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God really exist? Why is God silent? Where is God? Why does God not answer our prayers? These are the questions that many victims and survivors of the Holocaust asked. In the decades following the Holocaust many scholars and theologians world wide, have sought answers to these questions. Their findings challenge the way we have understood many of our traditional beliefs. Unfortunately, their findings and insights have not been generally known or studied by the laity or clergy of the American churches. This small volume is intended to be an introduction to some of the serious theological issues raised by the Holocaust. Study groups, church groups, and individuals will find this book an effective tool for becoming acquainted with these important God questions. The journey to face Auschwitz is not without spiritual challenges. It can be an inner struggle to re-examine certain long held beliefs, but it can also be a journey to spiritual enlightenment. This study will start the reader on that journey. If the Church is to regain its integrity and its mission of justice, mercy, and compassion, it must face Auschwitz.
Download or read book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz written by Melissa Raphael and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length feminist dialogue with Holocaust theory, theology and social history. Considers women's reactions to the holy in the camps at Auschwitz.
Download or read book The Messiah Factor written by Tony Pearce and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who Do You say that I am? was the question Jesus asked the disciples. This book looks at some contemporary Jewish answers to that question (and answers to those answers). It also examines the history of anti-Semitism and how that has influenced people in our modern era. Whether Jewish or non-Jewish, The Messiah Factor brings many vital issues to the table challenging us all to answer that question, Who do you say that I am? Issues raised include: Why has the professing church often persecuted Jewish People? Where was God when the six million perished? If Jesus is the Messiah, why is there no peace in the world? Do events in the Middle East today tie in with the prophecies of the Bible, and if so, how will they end? What clues do the Hebrew Prophets give to Messiah s identity?
Download or read book Grace in Auschwitz written by Jean-Pierre Fortin and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postmodern human condition and relationship to God were forged in response to Auschwitz. Christian theology must now address the challenge posed by the Shoah. Grace in Auschwitz offers a constructive theology of grace that enables twenty-first-century Westerners to relate meaningfully to the Christian tradition in the wake of the Holocaust and unprecedented evil. Through narrative theological testimonial history, the first part articulates the human condition and relationship to God experienced by concentration camp inmates. The second part draws from the lives and works of Simone Weil, Dorothee Solle, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Sergei Bulgakov to propose and apply a coherent kenotic model enabling the transposition of the Christian doctrine of grace into categories strongly correlating with the experience of Auschwitz survivors. This model centers on the vulnerable Jesus Christ, a God who takes on the burden of the human condition and freely suffers alongside and for human beings. In and through the person of Jesus, God is made present and active in the midst of spiritual desolation and destitution, providing humanity and solace to others.
Download or read book The Trial of God written by Elie Wiesel and published by Schocken. This book was released on 1995-11-14 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod) A Play by Elie Wiesel Translated by Marion Wiesel Introduction by Robert McAfee Brown Afterword by Matthew Fox Where is God when innocent human beings suffer? This drama lays bare the most vexing questions confronting the moral imagination. Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place in the aftermath of a pogrom. Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer. The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: “Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.” Inspired and challenged by this play, Christian theologians Robert McAfee Brown and Matthew Fox, in a new Introduction and Afterword, join Elie Wiesel in the search for faith in a world where God is silent.
Download or read book Fire in the Ashes written by David Patterson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, pondering the enormity of that event. This book explores how inquiry about the Holocaust challenges understanding, especially its religious and ethical dimensions. Debates about God's relationship to evil are ancient, but the Holocaust complicated them in ways never before imagined. Its massive destruction left Jews and Christians searching among the ashes to determine what, if anything, could repair the damage done to tradition and to theology. Since the end of the Holocaust, Jews and Christians have increasingly sought to know how or even whether theological analysis and reflection can aid in comprehending its aftermath. Specifically, Jews and Christians, individually and collectively, find themselves more and more in the position of needing either to rethink theodicy -- typically understood as the vindication of divine justice in the face of evil -- or to abolish the concept altogether. Writing in a format that creates the feel of dialogue, the contributors to Fire in the Ashes confront these and other difficult questions about God and evil after the Holocaust. This book -- created out of shared concerns and a desire to investigate differences and disagreements between religious traditions and philosophical perspectives -- represents an effort to advance meaningful conversation between Jews and Christians and to encourage others to participate in similar inter- and intrafaith inquiries. The contributors to Fire in the Ashes are members of the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium. Led since its founding in 1996 by Leonard Grob and Henry F. Knight, the symposium's Holocaust and genocide scholars -- a group that is interfaith, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational -- meet biennially in Oxfordshire, England.
Download or read book Where Was God in Auschwitz written by Josef Seifert and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where was God in Auschwitz? Can there be any God, at least any good and omnipotent God, if such hellish evils exist? After posing this question in all honesty and depth, the first chapter refutes several theories, some of them quite venerable, that deny existence to evils, reduce evils to some unreality or mere lack of good, or declare them to be an indispensable part of the best possible world. The book seeks to establish the errors of these attempts to tame the ferocious reality of evil and refutes some of their assumptions. At the same time, it recognizes and defends the important truths contained in three of these four classical attempts at "taming evil." Thus resisting any playing down the ferocious reality of evil, it offers a critical analysis of the Augustinian, Thomist and Leibnizean defenses of God in front of evil but defends the parasitic character of evil, thus rejecting any Manichean dualism.The second chapter explains the atheist argumentation against God based on the horrific reality of evil. Recognizing the reality of awful evils seems to lead to a logical contradiction between 3 propositions each theist holds true: 1. An infinitely good God exists. 2. An omnipotent God exists. 3. Evils exist. The only option that seems to be left to a serious philosopher after Auschwitz is atheism, or denying either that God is good or that he is omnipotent, which many atheists consider a dishonest "polite atheism."The third chapter shows that there are many evident and some possible hidden good reasons for God's allowing the evil of pain to occur for the sake of immense values that are dependent on the free will of persons. The only key to understand causes and reasons for suffering lies in the even greater evil: moral evil, and in moral goodness that overarches the evils in the world. The atheist cannot refute the many reasons for suffering that philosophy detects in the complex interrelations between pain and moral evil. While this audacious book demands that philosophy stretches itself to its very limits in order to apprehend meaning even in Auschwitz, it does not claim a self-sufficiency of human reason in confrontation with the mystery of evil, nor does it preclude that only far higher values accessible solely to religious faith can provide an ultimate answer to where God was in Auschwitz and to why he permits evil. While they are hidden from mere human reason, the atheist cannot refute these higher reasons and can understand their possibility, and also for this reason the construction of an atheist conclusion from Auschwitz and other atrocities fails.The final chapter copes with the challenge, based on the evil of manifold human errors, against a God who is Truth itself. It liberates God from the claim that He made human errors about the most important things inevitable or that some errors that no human person can avoid are such great evils that no higher goods (such as trust and interhuman love) can justify permitting their occurrence.Chapter 4 assesses critically important contributions of Ren� Descartes but offers an original answer to any atheist challenge to the veracity of God.The book ascends to the very heights of a philosophical answer to its great question: Can God exist if Auschwitz exists? Without a rationalistic claim of comprehending fully the mystery of evil, Seifert carefully distinguishes between admitting unsolvable mysteries about evil in relation to God and disproving God's existence. A Socratic wisdom and silence in the face of the question "where was God in Auschwitz?" must be sharply distinguished from the proud and untenable claim of having refuted the existence of an infinitely good and omnipotent God through the reality of Auschwitz and of countless other evils.This book is a substantially corrected, revised and simplified text published 2016 as "Does the Reality of Evil Disprove the Existence of God?". It addresses itself to all readers who long for a reply to its question.
Download or read book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz written by Melissa Raphael and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, the first full-length feminist theology of the Holocaust, argues that the patriarchal bias of post-Holocaust theology becomes fully apparent only when women's experiences and priorities are brought into historical light. Building upon the published testimonies of four women imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau - Olga Lengyel, Lucie Adelsberger, Bertha Ferderber-Salz and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - it considers women's distinct experiences of the holy in relation to God's perceived presence and absence in the camps. God's face, says Melissa Raphael, was not hidden in Auschwitz, but intimately revealed in the female face turned towards the other as a refractive image of God, especially in the moral protest made visible through material and spiritual care for the assaulted other.
Download or read book Hope Against Hope written by Ekkehard Schuster and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are probably no two men of such stature who can speak to the Holocaust as Christian theologian Johann Baptist Metz, author of A Passion for God and Jewish writer, Nobel laureate and human rights activist, Elie Wiesel, author of Night. One was drafted into the German army at the age of fifteen; the other was interned at Auschwitz. Both came from upbringings of deep faith, only to have their lives broken by the horrors they witnessed during the war. Both share the sense that the Holocaust is a rift in history itself, after which nothing could ever be seen in the same way as before. Yet for both, there is hope ... "nonetheless."
Download or read book May God Avenge Their Blood written by Rachmil Bryks and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-05-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: May God Avenge Their Blood: a Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912–1974). In "Those Who Didn't Survive," Bryks portrays inter-war life in his shtetl Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland with great flair and rich anthropological detail, rendering a haunting collective portrait of an annihilated community. "The Fugitives" vividly charts the confusion and terror of the early days of World War II in the industrial city of Łódź and elsewhere. In the final memoir, "From Agony to Life," Bryks tells of his imprisonment in Auschwitz and other camps. Taken together, the triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity. This translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings the extraordinary memoirs of an important Yiddish writer to English-language readers for the first time.
