“Nature and Norm makes a persuasive case that Jewish and Christian thinkers have tended to treat modern natural science as the prototype of logical validity, often despite their stated intention… The heart of Nature and Norm is Rashkover’s account of pragmatic inquiry, together with her analysis of the history of modern failures to come to terms with the fact/value divide… I suspect that her lasting contribution to Jewish and Christian thought will consist in her distinctive articulation of a pragmatic rationalism, her useful framework for identifying arbitrary anchoring, and her provocative hypothesis that contemporary religious life cannot remain viable without cultivating philosophic practices of immanent critique.”
– Mark Randall James, Journal of Textual Reasoning
“This is an excellent, bold study that provides a fresh perspective on Jewish and Christian thought. Rashkover’s writing is lucid and engaging without sacrificing philosophical rigor, and she moves seamlessly between broad claims about intellectual history, focused treatments of specific thinkers, and constructive arguments about theopolitical discourse. Particularly impressive is her skill in handling the sheer diversity of figures featured in her case studies, along with lesser-known figures who surface along the way... Nature and Norm is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of Jewish and Christian thought.”
– Elias Sacks, University of Colorado Boulder, Modern Theology
"Randi Rashkover’s Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity, and the Theopolitical Problem has two theses. The first thesis concerns the fact-value divide, an epistemological commitment so common in Western modernity that literary critic Wayne Booth called it the ‘modern dogma…’ Rashkover argues convincingly that this divide is harmful to religious praxis. She makes her case by bringing together otherwise strange bedfellows, Jewish and Christian, whose commitment to, or tacit entanglement with, the fact-value divide variously inhibits their religious claims… The book’s second thesis concerns the epistemological journey of modern Western culture. Rashkover makes the provocative claim that the figures listed above embody a journey from lesser to greater epistemological self-consciousness… Both of Rashkover’s theses are broadly convincing. Christians and Jews in the West will be acquainted with the negative impact that comes from assigning their faith without remainder to either the 'fact' category (e.g., dogmatic fundamentalism) or the 'value' category (e.g., wishy-washy accommodation). But Rashkover helpfully shows how a variety of figures that rise above these crude extremes, and who indeed might otherwise have little in common, struggle with this same difficulty. That she does so across religious traditions is a particularly gracious act of hospitality that primes the pump for further fruitful dialogue. And the claim that getting past the fact-value divide requires religious communities to self-consciously engage in evaluation of the conditions of logical validity is correct as well."
–David Bruner, Reading Religion
“Nature and Norm calls all modern and postmodern Jewish and Christian philosophers and religious thinkers to attention, as if to declare: ‘Hear this! Despite your perpetual intellection and reams of writings, you have collectively failed to overcome modernity’s effort to disaggregate sciences of fact from public practices of value.’ Peering deeply into the modern religious writings many of us love to read and teach, Randi Rashkover demonstrates that the problem is not merely epistemological (the foundationalism, nominalism, or binarism many of us already decry). It is also theopolitical: a persistent tendency to segregate spheres of religious thought from socio-political vision and practice. Peering even more deeply, she rediscovers antecedent sources of integration, and then—the crowning achievement of this landmark study—she reintroduces us to the disciplines of transcendental inquiry that have already, for the past century, been showing us how to retrieve those sources as guides to re-integration.”
—Peter Ochs, Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies, University of Virginia
“Nature and Norm is constructive philosophical thinking at its best, probing the meaning of making theological, moral, political and scientific claims in the real social contexts in which we find ourselves implicated and enmeshed. Rashkover’s argument is in part a philosophical story of how facts and values have been continually partitioned in modern and even contemporary Jewish and Christian thought. But it is also an important intervention that seeks to model a kind of inferential thinking that tends to the plurality of ways claims are made intelligible, even seemingly irreconcilable ones, from out of the communal spaces of reasoning we occupy. Beginning with the critical juncture at which scientific thinking gained autonomy from theological justification, however, Rashkover argues that modern and post-liberal Christian and Jewish thought have failed to account for inherited epistemological antinomies that serve as blindspots in philosophical, theological, and especially what she calls theopolitical claim-making. Rashkover’s argument is thus a necessary intervention. Any philosophical theologian would do well to consider Rashkover’s argument, if coherence is what they seek. Then again, even those willing to resist Rashkover’s conclusions will nonetheless benefit from the rigorous re-reading of some of the most important philosophical problems in modern Christian and Jewish thought presented here, as well as from her call for rigorous immanent critique and self-reflection. Indeed, readers who might not reach the same conclusions as Rashkover will yet find this work compelling for the critical reflection on knowledge claims it demands and observes. Nature and Norm is truly a remarkable work of thinking.”
—Paul E. Nahme, Dorot Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, Brown University
“Nature and Norm is a strident and compelling work. Diagnosing the fact-value divide as it has plagued modern Jewish and Christian thought since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, it rehabilitates normative theo-political claims by re-embedding them in the one world about which science also speaks, overcoming the false binary between the ‘objectivity’ of the natural sciences and the ‘subjectivity’ of ethical, political and theological discourse. In this way it speaks powerfully into our contemporary religious and political malaise, re-establishing the possibility of robust normative discourse in the public sphere, and providing a logical basis for reasoned inter-religious dialogue that avoids both relativist pluralism and exclusivism. The book is a profound contribution to the repair of a fundamental problem in modern society.”
—Susannah Ticciati, Reader in Christian Theology, King’s College London
