ISBN:
9780691136707
Language:
English
Pages:
XIV, 254 S.
Year of publication:
2008
DDC:
296.3/110904
Keywords:
Jonas, Hans
;
Scholem, Gershom Gerhard
;
Strauss, Leo
;
Strauss, Leo
;
Jonas, Hans
;
Scholem, Gershom
;
Geschichte 1900-2000
;
Geschichte 1918-1939
;
Geschichte
;
God (Judaism) History of doctrines 20th century
;
Philosophy, Jewish History 20th century
;
Heresy History 20th century
;
Pantheism History 20th century
;
Gnosticism History 20th century
;
Europe Intellectual life 20th century
;
Gnosis
;
Jüdische Philosophie
;
Jüdische Theologie
;
Pantheismus
;
Häresie
;
Europa
;
Deutschland
;
Jonas, Hans 1903-1993
;
Strauss, Leo 1899-1973
;
Scholem, Gershom 1897-1982
;
Jüdische Philosophie
;
Geschichte 1918-1939
;
Deutschland
;
Häresie
;
Gnosis
;
Pantheismus
;
Jüdische Theologie
;
Geschichte 1918-1939
Abstract:
Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the interruption of his call. In response, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the two most potent challenges to the monotheistic tradition. In God Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the ensuing debates about the divine across confessions and disciplines. He also traces the surprising afterlives of these debates in postwar arguments about the environment, neoconservative politics, and heretical forms of Jewish identity. In lively, elegant prose, the book reorients the intellectual history of the era. God Interrupted also provides novel accounts of three German-Jewish thinkers whose ideas, seminal to fields typically regarded as wildly unrelated, had common origins in debates about heresy between the wars. Hans Jonas developed a philosophy of biology that inspired European Greens and bioethicists the world over. Leo Strauss became one of the most important and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion, radically recast what it means to be a Jew. Together they help us see how talk about God was adapted for talk about nature, politics, technology, and art. They alert us to the abiding salience of the divine to Europeans between the wars and beyond--even among those for whom God was long missing or dead.
Note:
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index
URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24106
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