Download or read book Human Nature and Jewish Thought eGalley written by Alan L. Mittleman and published by . This book was released on with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On Human Nature in Early Judaism written by Jeffrey P. García and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Human Nature Jewish Thought written by Alan Mittleman and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is lucid, deeply erudite, and significant. In bringing Jewish sources into conversation with contemporary scientific claims about human nature, Alan Mittleman makes a strong and lively argument for the enduring centrality of human dignity, the profound possibilities of human life, and the importance of considering Jewish voices in ongoing debates about human nature. Anyone interested in Jewish thought, what it means to be human, or both, will benefit and learn a great deal from this wonderful work."--Leora F. Batnitzky, Princeton University "Human Nature & Jewish Thought is a personal, humane, and nuanced defense of the importance of our moral lives to what it means to be a human being, a defense that does complete justice to recent philosophical and scientific contributions yet is marked by a firm control of classical, medieval, and contemporary Jewish sources. Alan Mittleman writes with grace and intelligence. This is a wonderful example of how to write Jewishly and philosophically about central puzzles and problems that face us all."--Michael L. Morgan, University of Toronto "An eloquent, tightly written, and insightful reflection on the meaning of being human, Alan Mittleman's book bridges the gap between traditional Jewish accounts of human nature and contemporary philosophy, science, and social theory. His philosophically informed defense of personhood is an important contribution to the debate about human dignity in our technological age."--Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University "Alan Mittleman, an outstanding contributor to philosophically serious Jewish thought, builds a solid structure of deeply spiritual but always open-eyed reflections. He invites readers on an intellectual journey that confronts and deflates many idols of the age with reasoned argument informed by Jewish tradition, without appeal to authority or blind, reactive romanticism."--Lenn Goodman, Vanderbilt University "This timely and readable work connects biblical and rabbinic thought with enduring questions concerning human nature, highlighting the substantial contemporary relevance of those traditions of thought. Human Nature & Jewish Thought explains how ideas with an ancient anchoring remain strongly relevant to reflection on human self-understanding and to values integral to leading distinctively human lives."--Jonathan Jacobs, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

Download or read book Jews and the American Soul written by Andrew R. Heinze and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-05 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

Download or read book Believing and Its Tensions written by Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013-07-13 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate and candid examination of the changing nature of belief and where it can lead us—from the life experience of one of Judaism's leading thinkers. For over five decades, Rabbi Neil Gillman has helped people think through the most challenging questions at the heart of being a believing religious person. In this intimate rethinking of his own theological journey he explores the changing nature of belief and the complexities of reconciling the intellectual, emotional and moral questions of his own searching mind and soul. If what we have in recognizing, speaking of and experiencing God is a wide-ranging treasury of humanly crafted metaphors, what, then, is the ultimate reality, the ultimate nature of God? What lies beyond the metaphors? If humanity was an active partner in revelation—if the human community participated in what was revealed and gave it meaning—what then should be the authority of Jewish law? How do we cope—intellectually, emotionally and morally—with suffering, the greatest challenge to our faith commitment, relationship with God and sense of a fundamentally ordered world? Death is inevitable but why is it built in as part of the total life experience?

Download or read book Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself written by Lenn E. Goodman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-02 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Lenn E. Goodman writes about the commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself" from the standpoint of Judaism, a topic and perspective that have not often been joined before. Goodman addresses two big questions: What does that command ask of us? and what is its basis? Drawing extensively on Jewish sources, both biblical and rabbinic, he fleshes out the cultural context and historical shape taken on by this Levitical commandment. In so doing, he restores the richness of its material content to this core articulation of our moral obligations, which often threatens to sink into vacuity as a mere nostrum or rhetorical formula. Goodman argues against the notion that we have this obligation simply because God demands it -- a position that too readily makes ethics seem arbitrary, relativistic, dogmatic, authoritarian, contingent or just unpalatable. Rather he proposes that we learn much about how we ought to think about God from what we know about morals. He shows that natural reasoning and appeals to scripture, tradition, and revelation reinforce one another in ethical deliberation. For Goodman, ethics and theology are not worlds apart connected only by a kind of narrow one-way passage; the two realms of discourse can and should inform each other. Engaging the philosophers, including Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant, and assembling three-thousand years worth of Jewish textual masterpieces, Goodman skillfully weaves his Gifford Lectures, which he delivered in 2005, into an indispensable work.

Download or read book Love Your Neighbor and Yourself written by Elliot N. Dorff and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2006-02-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this topically relevant book on modern ethical issues, Dorff focuses on personal ethics, Judaism's distinctive way of understanding human nature, our role in life, and what we should strive to be, both as individuals and as members of a community. Dorff addresses specific moral issues that affect our personal lives: privacy, particularly at work as it is affected by the Internet and other modern technologies; sex in and outside of marriage; family matters, such as adoption, surrogate motherhood, stepfamilies, divorce, parenting, and family violence; homosexuality; justice, mercy, and forgiveness; and charitable acts and social action.

Download or read book Does Judaism Condone Violence written by Alan L. Mittleman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical case against religious violence We live in an age beset by religiously inspired violence. Terms such as “holy war” are the stock-in-trade of the evening news. But what is the relationship between holiness and violence? Can acts such as murder ever truly be described as holy? In Does Judaism Condone Violence?, Alan Mittleman offers a searching philosophical investigation of such questions in the Jewish tradition. Jewish texts feature episodes of divinely inspired violence, and the position of the Jews as God’s chosen people has been invoked to justify violent acts today. Are these justifications valid? Or does our understanding of the holy entail an ethic that argues against violence? Reconstructing the concept of the holy through a philosophical examination of biblical texts, Mittleman finds that the holy and the good are inextricably linked, and that our experience of holiness is authenticated through its moral consequences. Our understanding of the holy develops through reflection on God’s creation of the natural world, and our values emerge through our relations with that world. Ultimately, Mittleman concludes, religious justifications for violence cannot be sustained. Lucid and incisive, Does Judaism Condone Violence? is a powerful counterargument to those who claim that the holy is irrational and amoral. With philosophical implications that extend far beyond the Jewish tradition, this book should be read by anyone concerned about the troubling connection between holiness and violence.

Download or read book Judaism Human Rights and Human Values written by Lenn E. Goodman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-12-03 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following on the heels of his critically acclaimed God of Abraham (Oxford, 1996), Lenn E. Goodman here focuses on rights, their grounding in the deserts of beings, and the dignity of persons. In an incisive contemporary dialogue between reason and revelation, Goodman argues for ethical standards and public policies that respect human rights and support the preservation of all beings: animals, plants, econiches, species, habitats, and the monuments of nature and culture. Immersed in the Jewish and philosophical sources, Goodmans argument ranges from the fetus in the womb to the modern nation state, from the problems of pornography and tobacco advertising to the rights of parents and children, individuals and communities, the powerful and powerless--the most ancient and the most immediate problems of human life and moral responsibility. Guided by the probing argumentation that Goodman lays out with distinctive, often poetic clarity, the reader will emerge enlightened and prepared to respond with intelligence and commitment to the sobering moral challenges of the coming century. This is a book for anyone concerned with law, ethics, and the human prospect.

Download or read book An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thinkers written by Alan T. Levenson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting well-known Jewish thinkers from a very wide spectrum of opinion, the author addresses a range of issues, including: What makes a thinker Jewish? What makes modern Jewish thought modern? How have secular Jews integrated Jewish traditional thought with agnosticism? What do Orthodox thinkers have to teach non-Orthodox Jews and vice versa? Each chapter includes a short, judiciously chosen selection from the given author, along with questions to guide the reader through the material. Short biographical essays at the end of each chapter offer the reader recommendations for further readings and provide the low-down on which books are worth the reader's while. Introduction to Modern Jewish Thinkers represents a decade of the author's experience teaching students ranging from undergraduate age to their seventies. This is an ideal textbook for undergraduate classes.

Download or read book Reproducing Moral Agents written by Eva von Hirsch Eriksen and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Nature Need and Destiny of Man in Jewish Thought from the Exile to the Advent written by John Robert Roberts and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Faith and Reason written by Hugo Samuel Bergman and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book God Is Here written by Toba Spitzer and published by St. Martin's Essentials. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toba Spitzer's God Is Here is a transformative exploration of the idea of God, offering new paths to experiencing the realm of the sacred. Most of us are hungry for a system of meaning to make sense of our lives, yet traditional religion too often leaves those seeking spiritual sustenance unsatisfied. Rabbi Toba Spitzer understands this problem firsthand, and knows that too often it is traditional ideas of the deity—he's too big, too impersonal, and too unbelievable—that get in the way. In God Is Here, Spitzer argues that whether we believe in God or fervently disbelieve, what we are actually disagreeing about is not God at all, but a metaphor of a Big Powerful Person that limits our understanding and our spiritual lives. Going back to the earliest sources for Judaism as well as Christianity, Spitzer discovers in the Hebrew Bible a rich and varied palette of metaphors for the divine—including Water, Voice, Fire, Rock, Cloud, and even the process of Becoming. She addresses how we can access these ancient metaphors, as well as those drawn from rabbinic tradition and modern science, to experience holiness in our daily lives and to guide us in challenging times. In the section on water, for instance, she looks at the myriad ways water flows through the Biblical stories of the Israelites and emerges as a powerful metaphor for the divine in the Prophets and Psalms. She invites us to explore what it might mean to “drink from God,” or to experience godly justice as something that “rains down” and “flows like a river.” Each chapter contains insights from the Bible and teachings from Judaism and other spiritual traditions, accompanied by suggestions for practice to bring alive each of the God metaphors. Rabbi Toba Spitzer has helped many people satisfy their spiritual hunger. With God Is Here she will inspire you to find new and perhaps surprising ways of encountering the divine, right where you are.

Download or read book Thunder in the Soul written by Abraham Joshua Heschel and published by . This book was released on 2021-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Abraham Joshua Heschel, descended from a long line of Orthodox rabbis, fled Europe to escape the Nazis. He made the insights of traditional Jewish spirituality come alive for American Jews while speaking out boldly against war and racial injustice"--

Download or read book The Magna Carta of Humanity written by Os Guinness and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What kind of revolution brings true freedom to both society and the human soul? Cultural observer Os Guinness contrasts the secular French Revolution with the faith-led revolution of ancient Israel. Arguing that the story of Exodus is the richest vision for freedom in human history, his exploration charts the path to the future for America.

Download or read book The City Beautiful written by Aden Polydoros and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An achingly rendered exploration of queer desire, grief, and the inexorable scars of the past." —Katy Rose Pool, author of There Will Come A Darkness Death lurks around every corner in this unforgettable Jewish historical fantasy about a city, a boy, and the shadows of the past that bind them both together. Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he’ll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania. But when Alter’s best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World’s Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows. Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter’s body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer—before the killer claims them next. "Chillingly sinister, warmly familiar, and breathtakingly transportive, The City Beautiful is the haunting, queer Jewish historical thriller of my darkest dreams."—Dahlia Adler, creator of LGBTQreads and editor of That Way Madness Lies A New York Public Library Best Book for Teens 2021