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As Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist

Eitan P. Fishbane

This book explores the mystical thought of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko, a major medieval kabbalist whose work has until now received relatively little attention. Through consideration of an extensive ... More

This book explores the mystical thought of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko, a major medieval kabbalist whose work has until now received relatively little attention. Through consideration of an extensive literary corpus, including much that still remains in manuscript, this study examines an array of themes and questions that have great applicability to the comparative study of mysticism and the broader study of religion. These include prayer and the nature of mystical experience; meditative concentration directed to God; and the power of mental intention, authority, creativity, and the transmission of wisdom.Less

Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission

Michael Farquhar

This book considers efforts undertaken by the Saudi political and religious establishments to widen the sphere of Wahhabi influence beyond the kingdom’s borders from the mid-twentieth century. It ... More

This book considers efforts undertaken by the Saudi political and religious establishments to widen the sphere of Wahhabi influence beyond the kingdom’s borders from the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the history of the Islamic University of Medina (IUM), founded in 1961 to offer fully-funded religious instruction to mostly non-Saudi students. It demonstrates that this Saudi state-backed missionary initiative built on political, cultural, and social transformations tracing back to the late Ottoman period. It goes on to show that, just as the IUM sought to extend the authority and influence of the Wahhabi religious establishment into distant Muslim communities, its own operation was both enabled and influenced by migrants from across the Islamic world who came to work and study on its campus. Moreover, the university’s missionary project was further complicated insofar as it was refracted through the agency of the itinerant students who were expected to convey its Wahhabi-inflected message. The book argues that the complex history of such projects of Wahhabi “religious expansion” is best understood as involving a series of unequal transactions within the terms of a transnational religious economy, comprising flows of spiritual capital, material capital, religious migrants and social technologies. This analytical framework suggests new ways of thinking about the evolution of Wahhabism, the rise of Salafism in locations around the world, and the forms of power and agency at stake in border-spanning struggles to steer the future course of the Islamic tradition.Less

Contemplative Nation: A Philosophical Account of Jewish Theological Language

Cass Fisher

This book challenges the long-standing view that theology is not a vital part of the Jewish tradition. For political and philosophical reasons, both scholars of Judaism and Jewish thinkers have ... More

This book challenges the long-standing view that theology is not a vital part of the Jewish tradition. For political and philosophical reasons, both scholars of Judaism and Jewish thinkers have sought to minimize the role of theology in Judaism. This book constructs a new model for understanding Jewish theological language that emphasizes the central role of theological reflection in Judaism and the close relationship between theological reflection and religious practice in the Jewish tradition. Drawing on diverse philosophical resources, the book's model of Jewish theology embraces the multiple forms and functions of Jewish theological language. The book demonstrates the utility of this model by undertaking close readings of an early rabbinic commentary on the book of Exodus (Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael) and a work of modern philosophical theology (Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption). These readings advance the discussion of theology in rabbinics and modern Jewish thought and provide resources for constructive Jewish theology.Less

Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue

David Decosimo

This book examines Thomas Aquinas’s conception of “pagan virtue” – of whether non-Christians or those without grace can lead truly virtuous lives – and explains how that vision relates to the ... More

This book examines Thomas Aquinas’s conception of “pagan virtue” – of whether non-Christians or those without grace can lead truly virtuous lives – and explains how that vision relates to the substance of his ethics and his way of doing moral theology. Placing Thomas’s account of pagan virtue within his historical context and overarching theological vision, the book’s first part considers his relation to Jews and other non-Christians and reinterprets central facets of his ethics – goodness, habit, virtue – in relation to the question of pagan virtue. Part two elucidates key texts and themes (e.g. virtue’s unity, proximate and final ends, “perfection” language, infidelitas) necessary to decipher his account of pagan virtue; part three details the significance of sin and grace for that account. Where almost everyone holds that Thomas either follows Augustine and rejects pagan virtue or honors Aristotle and affirms it, this book argues that Thomas welcomes pagan virtue not in spite but because of Augustinian commitments – commitments which lead him, in his way of interacting with the pagan Aristotle, to perform the very welcome he prescribes. Driven by charity, he constructs an ethics that is Augustinian by being Aristotelian and vice versa, that enacts welcome and honors insider and outsider alike. Sketching a vision for Thomas’s ongoing significance for religious and political life that it calls “prophetic Thomism,” the book offers a new vision of his synthesis, an interpretation of his ethics, and a constructive proposal for welcoming outsider virtue without abandoning one’s own commitments.Less

Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China

Megan Bryson

This book follows the transformations of the goddess Baijie, a deity worshiped in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to understand how local identities developed in a Chinese ... More

This book follows the transformations of the goddess Baijie, a deity worshiped in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to understand how local identities developed in a Chinese frontier region from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. Dali, a region where the cultures of China, India, Tibet, and Southeast Asia converge, has long served as a nexus of religious interaction even as its status has changed. Once the center of independent kingdoms, it was absorbed into the Chinese imperial sphere with the Mongol conquest and remained there ever since. Goddess on the Frontier examines how people in Dali developed regional religious identities through the lens of the local goddess Baijie, whose shifting identities over this span of time reflect shifting identities in Dali. She first appears as a Buddhist figure in the twelfth century, then becomes known as the mother of a regional ruler, next takes on the role of an eighth-century widow martyr, and finally is worshiped as a tutelary village deity. Each of her forms illustrates how people in Dali represented local identities through gendered religious symbols. Taken together, they demonstrate how regional religious identities in Dali developed as a gendered process as well as an ethno-cultural process. This book applies interdisciplinary methodology to a wide variety of newly discovered and unstudied materials to show how religion, ethnicity, and gender intersect in a frontier region.Less

Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China

Fabrizio Pregadio

This book examines the religious aspects of Chinese alchemy. Its main focus is the relation of alchemy to the Daoist traditions of the early medieval period (third to sixth centuries). The book shows ... More

This book examines the religious aspects of Chinese alchemy. Its main focus is the relation of alchemy to the Daoist traditions of the early medieval period (third to sixth centuries). The book shows how alchemy contributed to and was tightly integrated into the elaborate body of doctrines and practices that Daoists built at that time, from which Daoism as we know it today evolved. It also clarifies the origins of Chinese alchemy and the respective roles of alchemy and meditation in self-cultivation practices. The book contains full translations of three important medieval texts, all of them accompanied by running commentaries, making available in English the gist of the early Chinese alchemical corpus.Less

Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism

Shaul Magid

Hasidism Incarnate argues that much of modern Judaism in the west developed under what it calls a “Christian gaze,” that is, reacting to Christianity by defending Judaism, positing that Judaism is ... More

Hasidism Incarnate argues that much of modern Judaism in the west developed under what it calls a “Christian gaze,” that is, reacting to Christianity by defending Judaism, positing that Judaism is unlike Christianity. This is done, ironically, while modern Judaism is being constructed as quite similar to Christianity in terms of its ethos, aesthetics, and attitude toward ritual and faith. Hasidism, unlike Judaism in Western Europe, is not developing under a “Christian gaze” and thus does not need to be apologetic of its positions. Free from an apologetic agenda (at least toward Christianity) what we find in Hasidism is a particular reading of medieval Jewish Kabbalah filtered through a focus on the charismatic leader that produces a religious world-view that shares a great deal with basic tenets of Christianity. This is because the basic many of the basic tenets of Christianity remained present, albeit often veiled, in much of kabbalistic teaching that was adopted in Hasidism to portray its notion of the charismatic figure (zaddik), often in supernatural terms. Hasidism Incarnate offer close readings of classical Hasidic texts to show the “Christian” tropes, which may have originally been “Jewish,” that lie beneath the surface of this multi-layered and textured literature.Less

Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters

Kenneth Stow

This is not a study of “anti-Semitism” or “anti-Judaism.” Instead, this book argues that to anchor claims of supersession, Catholics have viewed Jews as metaphoric—and sometimes not so ... More

This is not a study of “anti-Semitism” or “anti-Judaism.” Instead, this book argues that to anchor claims of supersession, Catholics have viewed Jews as metaphoric—and sometimes not so metaphoric—dogs. The dog has for millennia been the focus of impurity, and Catholicism fosters doctrines of physical purity that go hand in hand with those of ritual purity. The purity is that of the “one loaf” spoken of by St. Paul in Corinthians, which is, at once, the Eucharist and the collective Christian Corpus, the body of the faithful. Paul views this “loaf” as physically corruptible, and as John Chrysostom said at the close of the fourth century, the greatest threat to the loaf's purity are the Jews. They are the dogs who wish to steal the bread that belongs exclusively to the children. Eventually, Jews were said to attack the “loaf” through ritual murder and attempts to defile the Host itself; the victim of ritual murder is identified with the Host, as is common in Catholic martyrdom. Pope Pius IX still spoke of Jewish dogs barking throughout the streets of Rome in 1871. Other Catholic clergy were dismayed. This book is thus as much a study of Catholic doctrinal history as it is a study of Jews.Less

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880

Mordechai Nadav

Mark Mirsky and Moshe Rosman (eds)

This is the first part of a major scholarly project about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were the majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both ... More

This is the first part of a major scholarly project about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were the majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both traditional rabbinic scholars and famous Hasidic figures, and over time became an international trade emporium, a center of the Jewish Enlightenment, a cradle of Zionism and the Jewish Labor movement, and a place where Orthodoxy struggled vigorously with modernity. The two volumes of Pinsk history were originally part of a literature created by Jews who survived the Holocaust and who were determined to keep in memory a vital world that flourished for half a millennium.Less

Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination

Bjorn Krondorfer

This book examines how men open their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through confessional writing. It examines writings—by St. Augustine, a Jewish ghetto policeman, an imprisoned Nazi ... More

This book examines how men open their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through confessional writing. It examines writings—by St. Augustine, a Jewish ghetto policeman, an imprisoned Nazi perpetrator, and a gay American theologian—that reflect sincere attempts at introspective and retrospective self-investigation, often triggered by some wounding or rupture and followed by a transformative experience. The book takes seriously the vulnerability exposed in male self-disclosure while offering a critique of the religious and gendered rhetoric employed in such discourse. The religious imagination, it argues, allows men to talk about their intimate, flawed, and sinful selves without having to condemn themselves or to fear self-erasure. Herein lies the greatest promise of these confessions: by baring their souls to judgment, these writers may also transcend their self-imprisonment.Less