Monotheism & Ethics

Monotheism & Ethics

Author: Y. Tzvi Langermann

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-11-11

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 9004194290

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Fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the world explore the theological, philosophical, and historical connections between the three Abrahamic faiths and ethics. Timely reading for students of religion, philosophy, and ethics.


Radical Monotheism and Western Culture

Radical Monotheism and Western Culture

Author: Helmut Richard Niebuhr

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9780664253264

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This reissue of a classic work of H. Richard Niebuhr, one of the most influential and creative theological ethicists of the twentieth century, highlights his mature thinking. By using path-breaking interpretations of faith as a basic dimension of human life and culture as an arena of faith in conflict, Niebuhr encourages further thought. This volume should be required reading for anyone interested in recent perspectives on theology and ethics. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.


Ethical Monotheism

Ethical Monotheism

Author: Ehud Benor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1351263943

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The term Ethical Monotheism is an important marker in Judaism’s tumultuous transition into the modern era. The term emerged in the context of culture-wars concerning the question of whether or not Jews could or should become emancipated citizens of modern European states. It appeared in arguments whether or not Judaism could be considered a Religion of Reason—a symbolic, motivational representation of a universal morality, and in debates about whether or not Judaism could or should reform itself into a Religion of Reason. This book is both a decisive departure from such discussions and an attempt to add a further, post-modern, statement to their ongoing development. As departure, it refuses to take for granted a philosophical conception of Religion of Reason as the standard for Ethical Monotheism according to which Judaism was to be evaluated or reformed. As continuation, the book undertakes a phenomenology of Jewish modes of ethical religiosity that allows it to inquire what kind of ethical monotheism Judaism might be. Through sophisticated analysis of select "snapshots," or "fragments of a hologram," guided by a robust theory of religion, the author discloses Judaic ethical monotheism as an ongoing wrestling with the meaning of justice. By closely examining five main "snapshots" of this long process—the Bible, rabbinic Judaism, Maimonides, The Zohar, and the modern philosophers, Buber and Levinas—the author offers his own constructive philosophy of Judaism and his own distinctive philosophy of religion. Ethical Monotheism offers a new way to think about Judaism as a religion and as a coherent philosophical debate, and demonstrates the need to integrate philosophy, history, cognitive psychology, anthropology, theology, and history of science in the study of "religion."


Ubuntu and Western Monotheism

Ubuntu and Western Monotheism

Author: Kirk Lougheed

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-05

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 100043544X

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This book offers a unique comparative study of ubuntu, a dominant ethical theory in African philosophy, and western monotheism. It is the first book to bring ubuntu to bear on the axiology of theism debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. A large motivating force behind this book is to explore the extent to which there is intersubjective ethical agreement and disagreement between ubuntu and Western worldviews like monotheism and naturalism. First, the author assesses the various arguments for anti-theism and pro-theism on the assumption that ubuntu is true. Ubuntu’s communitarian focus might be so different from the Western tradition that it completely changes how we evaluate theism and atheism. Second, the author assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the truth of ubuntu for the world. Third and finally, he assesses the axiological status of faith for both monotheism and ubuntu. Ubuntu and Western Monotheism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students specializing in philosophy of religion, African religion and philosophy, and religious ethics.


Idolatry and Representation

Idolatry and Representation

Author: Leora Batnitzky

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-07-06

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1400823587

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Although Franz Rosenzweig is arguably the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, his thought remains little understood. Here, Leora Batnitzky argues that Rosenzweig's redirection of German-Jewish ethical monotheism anticipates and challenges contemporary trends in religious studies, ethics, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and biblical studies. This text, which captures the hermeneutical movement of Rosenzweig's corpus, is the first to consider the full import of the cultural criticism articulated in his writings on the modern meanings of art, language, ethics, and national identity. In the process, the book solves significant conundrums about Rosenzweig's relation to German idealism, to other major Jewish thinkers, to Jewish political life, and to Christianity, and brings Rosenzweig into conversation with key contemporary thinkers. Drawing on Rosenzweig's view that Judaism's ban on idolatry is the crucial intellectual and spiritual resource available to respond to the social implications of human finitude, Batnitzky interrogates idolatry as a modern possibility. Her analysis speaks not only to the question of Judaism's relationship to modernity (and vice versa), but also to the generic question of the present's relationship to the past--a subject of great importance to anyone contemplating the modern statuses of religious tradition, reason, science, and historical inquiry. By way of Rosenzweig, Batnitzky argues that contemporary philosophers and ethicists must relearn their approaches to religious traditions and texts to address today's central ethical problems.


A Million and One Gods

A Million and One Gods

Author: Page duBois

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-06-16

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0674728831

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As A Million and One Gods shows, polytheism is considered a scandalous presence in societies oriented to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Yet it persists, even in the West, perhaps because polytheism corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to civilized societies.


Beyond Monotheism

Beyond Monotheism

Author: Laurel Schneider

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-11-13

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1135947821

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Beyond Monotheism is an absorbing and lyrical exploration of the possibility of a new, living theology of multiplicity that is grounded in fluidity, change and incarnation.


Monotheism and Tolerance

Monotheism and Tolerance

Author: Robert Erlewine

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2010-01-11

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0253221560

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Monotheism and Tolerance suggests a way to deal with the intractable problem of religiously motivated and justified violence.


The Price of Monotheism

The Price of Monotheism

Author: Jan Assmann

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-10-29

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 080477286X

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Nothing has so radically transformed the world as the distinction between true and false religion. In this nuanced consideration of his own controversial Moses the Egyptian, renowned Egyptologist Jan Assmann answers his critics, extending and building upon ideas from his previous book. Maintaining that it was indeed the Moses of the Hebrew Bible who introduced the true-false distinction in a permanent and revolutionary form, Assmann reiterates that the price of this monotheistic revolution has been the exclusion, as paganism and heresy, of everything deemed incompatible with the truth it proclaims. This exclusion has exploded time and again into violence and persecution, with no end in sight. Here, for the first time, Assmann traces the repeated attempts that have been made to do away with this distinction since the early modern period. He explores at length the notions of primary versus secondary religions, of "counter-religions," and of book religions versus cultic religions. He also deals with the entry of ethics into religion's very core. Informed by the debate his own work has generated, he presents a compelling lesson in the fluidity of cultural identity and beliefs.


God's Zeal

God's Zeal

Author: Peter Sloterdijk

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-02-13

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 0745694659

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The conflicts between the three great monotheistic religions Christianity, Judaism and Islam are shaping our world more than ever before. In this important new book Peter Sloterdijk returns to the origins of monotheism in order to shed new light on the conflict of the faiths today. Following the polytheism of the ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians, Jewish monotheism was born as a theology of protest, as a religion of triumph within defeat. While the religion of the Jews remained limited to their own people, Christianity unfolded its message with proclamations of universal truth. Islam raised this universalism to a new level through a military and political mode of expansion. Sloterdijk examines the forms of conflict that arise between the three monotheisms by analyzing the basic possibilities stemming from anti-Paganism, anti-Judaism, anti-Islamism and anti-Christianism. These possibilities were augmented by internal rifts: a defining influence within Judaism was a separatism with defensive aspects, in Christianity the project of expansion through mission, and in Islam the Holy War.