Judaism


Book Description




Religion Or Ethnicity?


Book Description

Can someone be considered Jewish if he or she never goes to synagogue, doesn't keep kosher, and for whom the only connection to his or her ancestral past is attending an annual Passover seder? In Religion or Ethnicity? fifteen leading scholars trace the evolution of Jewish identity. The book examines Judaism from the Greco-Roman age, through medieval times, modern western and eastern Europe, to today. Jewish identity has been defined as an ethnicity, a nation, a culture, and even a race. Religion or Ethnicity? questions what it means to be Jewish. The contributors show how the Jewish people have evolved over time in different ethnic, religious, and political movements. In his closing essay, Gitelman questions the viability of secular Jewishness outside Israel but suggests that the continued interest in exploring the relationship between Judaism's secular and religious forms will keep the heritage alive for generations to come.




Religion and the Sciences of Origins


Book Description

This concise introduction to science and religion focuses on Christianity and modern Western science (the epicenter of issues in science and religion in the West) with a concluding chapter on Muslim and Jewish Science and Religion. This book also invites the reader into the relevant literature with ample quotations from original texts.




The Challenge of Creation


Book Description

The Challenge of Creation is a completely revised and vastly expanded edition of The Science Of Torah. That work was widely hailed as the best book of its kind for its honesty and thoroughness of approach. The Challenge of Creation builds upon its approach, covering more issues and in greater depth. Carefully, methodically, and eschewing sensationalistic or dogmatic claims in favor of reasoned analysis, it shows how some of the greatest Jewish thinkers explained Judaism and Genesis in a way that complements modern science rather than conflicts with it. The Challenge of Creation is an invaluable resource for anyone grappling with conflicts between science and religion. It is a profound work that is sure to become a classic




Seek My Face, Speak My Name


Book Description

Contemporary Jews. The book is at once a beginner's invitation to the profundity of Jewish spirituality and a rich rethinking of texts and positions for those who have already walked some distance along the Jewish path.




Religion in Human Evolution


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal




A People that Shall Dwell Alone


Book Description

MacDonald develops an evolutionary perspective on Judaism. Judaism is conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy characterized by a high degree of endogamy and resistance to genetic and cultural assimilation. Data are provided to support the author's theory that Judaism is characterized by a high level of within-group altruism and competition with outgroups. Finally, MacDonald argues that Judaism has been characterized by eugenic practices aimed at high intelligence and high investment parenting. After outlining a theory of evolutionary group strategies, MacDonald discusses the evidence from modern studies showing population genetic differences between Jews and Gentiles. He then shows that Jewish religious writing points to a pronounced tendency toward idealizing endogamy and condemning exogamy, and he points to the ways religious ideology and practice have facilitated the genetic and cultural separation of Jews and Gentiles. He then reviews evidence for resource and reproductive competition and the importance of kin-based cooperation and altruism as well as assortative mating for intelligence and resource aquisition ability among Jews. This study is a highly original attempt to develop an evolutionary understanding of one of the world's great religions. As such, it will be of concern to scholars and researchers in the fields of sociobiology and religion as well as the general reading public.




Genesis and the Big Bang Theory


Book Description

A ground-breaking book that takes on skeptics from both sides of the cosmological debate, arguing that science and the Bible are not at odds concerning the origin of the universe. The culmination of a physicist's thirty-five-year journey from MIT to Jerusalem, Genesis and the Big Bang presents a compelling argument that the events of the billions of years that cosmologists say followed the Big Bang and those of the first six days described in Genesis are, in fact, one and the same—identical realities described in vastly different terms. In engaging, accessible language, Dr. Schroeder reconciles the observable facts of science with the very essence of Western religion: the biblical account of Creation. Carefully reviewing and interpreting accepted scientific principles, analogous passages of Scripture, and biblical scholarship, Dr. Schroeder arrives at a conclusion so lucid that one wonders why it has taken this long in coming. The result for the reader—whether believer or skeptic, Jewish or Christian—is a totally fresh understanding of the key events in the life of the universe.




Response to Modernity


Book Description

Comprehensive and balanced history of the Reform Movement. The movement for religious reform in modern Judaism represents one of the most significant phenomena in Jewish history during the last two hundred years. It introduced new theological conceptions and innovations in liturgy and religious practice that affected millions of Jews, first in central and Western Europe and later in the United States. Today Reform Judaism is one of the three major branches of Jewish faith. Bringing to life the ideas, issues, and personalities that have helped to shape modern Jewry, Response to Modernity offers a comprehensive and balanced history of the Reform Movement, tracing its changing configuration and self-understanding from the beginnings of modernization in late 18th century Jewish thought and practice through Reform's American renewal in the 1970s.