New and Notable: Recent Publications of Interest - Information Resources - Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies



	Information Resources New and Notable *Recent Publications of Interest* (List posted in October 2004) In an effort to help interested readers keep abreast of new publications in the disciplines that lie at the heart of the work of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, we offer a short list of recently-published books and brief descriptions of each book. These descriptions are not reviews: No positive or negative judgments are offered with regard to the books' contents. New and Notable: Preaching the Gospels without Blaming the Jews, by Ronald J. Allen & Clark M. Williamson Mothers and Children, by Elisheva Baumgarten Border Lines, by Daniel Boyarin The Art of Reading Scripture, edited by Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain, by Mark D. Meyerson Antisemitism, by Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer The Holy Reich, by Richard Steigmann-Gall Educating People of Faith, edited by John Van Engen Ronald J. Allen and Clark M. Williamson. Preaching the Gospels without Blaming the Jews: A Lectionary Commentary. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John cannot be understood without some knowledge of the Scrip-tures, practices, institutions, and people of first-century Judaism. But the Gospels cannot be understood properly without further knowledge of the tensions between the communities of the Gospel writers and other Jewish groups, and of the ways in which Gospel writers carica-tured and polemicized the practices, institutions, and people in order to justify their separation from these Jewish groups. Prompted by Jewish-Christian conversa-tions about the Christian "teaching of contempt" for Jews and Judaism that began after the Holocaust and have intensified in the last several decades, Ronald Allen and Clark Williamson have created a readable, easy-to-use commentary on the Gospel readings in the Revised Common Lectionary. Their goal is twofold: (1) to show how the readings are continuous with first-century Jew-ish theology, values, and practices; and (2) to reflect critically on the caricatures contained in the readings in order to help preachers and congregations "move beyond these contentious themes to a greater sense of kinship and shared mission with Judaism." Ronald J. Allen is the Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Preaching and New Testament at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. Clark M. Williamson is Indiana Professor of Christian Thought Emeritus at the same seminary. He is also a member of the church relations committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. Return to list. Elisheva Baumgarten. Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe. Princeton University Press, 2004. Elisheva Baumgarten, Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University, draws extensively on primary sources, including little-used and still unavailable manuscripts, to limn a portrait of medieval Jewish family life in Germany and Northern France. She concentrates her study on the roles of mothers and children during the period of childhood that begins at birth and ends with the start of formal education at age seven, investigating nearly every aspect of home life. She takes as her overriding concept the notion that nurturing practices developed by Jewish parents were similar to those of their Christian neighbors, and her methodology is explic-itly comparative. Her book provides a important new piece in the fabric of Jewish social history in the Middle Ages. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. Return to list. Daniel Boyarin. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Scholars generally think of Christianity as a movement that began within Second Temple Judaism and ultimately split away from it. Even before the "parting of the ways," it is assumed, there were specific beliefs and practices that were identifiably Jewish or Christian. In Border Lines Daniel Boyarin challenges this under-standing, arguing that in late antiquity no characteristics or features were uniquely Jewish or Christian, not even such things as belief in a second divine being, keeping kosher, or observing Shabbat. Boyarin theorizes that those things that ultimately came to distinguish Judaism and Christianity from one another were imposed from above by "border makers," who wanted to establish a distinct identity for Christianity. These people defined particular beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, thereby forcing ideas, behaviors, and people to line up on one side or the other of an artificial border and, in the process, inventing for Christianity the notion of religion as a realm of belief and practices that was in a sense separate from other cultural features. The rabbis, Boyarin contends, rejected the possibility of converting Judaism into the same kind of "religion." Christianity, a religion, and Judaism, not a religion, thus stood on either side of the border line drawn between two peoples. This development, Boyarin suggests, explains why the adjective "Jewish" can describe both a set of beliefs and an ethnicity, while "Christian" cannot be used to describe anything except a religion. Daniel Boyarin is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. Return to list. Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, editors. The Art of Reading Scripture. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003. In these confusing and dangerous early days of the second millennium following the birth of Christ, the Church's voice is increasingly difficult to hear in our society. The Bible has lost much of its authority for the faith and practice of Christianity because the Church seems no longer capable of reading it in imagina-tive ways that speak to the lives people lead now. How to read and interpret the Bible in and for the twenty-first century is a serious question. The contributors to The Art of Reading Scripture seek to answer that ques-tion, to recover what the Church has lost, and to find an authoritative place for the Bible in a postmodern pluralistic and secular society that is more interested in "self-help" books than in the Book about God's actions to help a broken creation. This book is an outgrowth of "The Scripture Project," a study conducted by a group of fifteen scholars and pastors who met over a four-year period at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey. The essays in Part I -- "How Do We Read and Teach the Scriptures?" -- provide the theoretical framework for a new approach to reading and inter-preting the Bible. Those in Part II -- "A Living Tradition" -- discuss ways in which the Bible has been interpreted in Christian tradition and suggest new possibilities for interpretation in a world in which traditional schemes no longer suffice. Part III -- "Reading Difficult Texts" -- digs into the actual work of exegesis, examining specific passages that are especially difficult for the Church to interpret in our time. The final section of the book speaks to the living Word of God in the Church, offering actual sermons written by the editors of this volume. In addition to the editors, contributors include Gary A. Anderson, Richard Bauckham, Brian E. Daley, James C. Howell, Robert W. Jenson, William Stacy Johnson, L. Gregory Jones, Christine McSpadden, R. W. L. Moberly, David C. Steinmetz, and Marianne Meye Thompson. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. Return to list. Mark D. Meyerson. A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Princeton University Press, 2004. Meyerson's aim in this detailed and wide-ranging history is to show that the conventional negative understanding of the Jewish experience in medieval Spain in the cen-tury before Jews were expelled in 1492 is not accurate. He focuses his analysis on one town -- Morvedre, in the kingdom of Valencia -- to show how and why the Jewish community there flourished. Using archival documenta-tion from Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, Meyerson, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, argues that Morvedre enjoyed a Jewish "renaissance." Meyerson demonstrates how favorable policies of kings and local government led to the demographic expansion and prosperity of the Jewish community in the town, and how measures that minimized the role of Jews as money-lenders helped to improve relations between Jews and Christians and to provide opportunities for Jews to achieve greater economic diversification. Meyerson's work also joins the scholarly conversation about the origin of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The book offers an extended analysis of Jewish-converso relations in Morvedre and shows how Morvedre's Jews expressed their piety by assisting the conversos. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. Return to list. Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer. Antisemi-tism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. As conditions have wor-sened in the Middle East in recent years, there has been a concomitant increase in antisemitism in Europe. Particularly troublesome is the routine use by mainstream Muslim publications of medieval Christian and modern European, especially Nazi, myths about Jews. In this book, historians Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer explore the myths, lies, and misperceptions about Jews and Judaism that first arose in antiquity and are still with us today: Jews as the killers of Christ, as instruments of Satan, and as ritual murderers of Chris-tian children. Perry and Schweitzer delve into the persistent myths that Jews conspire to dominate the world, that they manufactured the Holocaust in order to get reparations from Germany, and that they were lead-ers in the African slave trade. This study by Perry and Schweitzer is critically important in today's world as a corrective to the lies, distortions, bigotry, and stereo-typing that have plagued Jews for thousands of years. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. Return to list. Richard Steigmann-Gall. The Holy Reich: Nazi Concep-tions of Christianity, 1919-1945. Cambridge University Press, 2003. It is commonly assumed that had Adolf Hitler succeeded in killing all the Jews of Europe, he would have chosen Christians as the next group to be eliminated. Richard Steigmann-Gall, Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University, has analyzed the previously unexamined religious views of the Nazi elite, and his findings persuade him to challenge conventional wisdom. In The Holy Reich Steigmann-Gall argues that many people who were part of the Nazi movement felt a personal attachment to Christianity and found a warrant for their antisemitic, anti-Marxist, and anti-liberal ideol-ogy in Christian values. Steigmann-Gall places much emphasis in his book on "positive Christianity," a religion espoused by many Nazi party leaders. These men struggled with others in the party who rejected Chris-tianity completely, believing it to be foreign and corrupting. Examined closely, Steigmann-Gall shows this conflict between the two groups to be not just a dif-ference of opinion about religion but a serious disagreement about the very nature of Nazi ideology. Steigmann-Gall has succeeded in producing an original piece of work in a very crowded historical field. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. Return to list. John Van Engen, editor. Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Commu-nities. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004. The focus of this book is church and synagogue practices that had the power to shape the faith of Christians and Jews from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Contributors include Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars who wished to explore "how Jews and Christians have been formed in religious ways of thinking and acting" through an examination of the influence of "practices" on religious formation. Essays describe religious figures, community life, and traditional practices -- preaching, sacraments, and catechesis. The authors also investigate religious education across all levels of society, from highly literate rabbis and monks to illiterate medieval Christians whose religious formation came through the veneration of saints' shrines, street performances of religious dramas, and "sermons" by wandering preachers. This book will appeal to scholars, theologians, pastors, and teachers interested in an understanding of how lived practices have historically influenced the formation of religious faith. Contributors to this volume include John C. Cavadini, Anne L. Clark, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Joseph Goering, Robert Goldenberg, Stanley Samuel Harakas, Robert M. Kingdom, Blake Leyerle, Michael A. Signer, Philip M. Soergel, David C. Steinmetz, John Van Engen, Lee Palmer Wandel, Robert Louis Wilken, and Elliot R. Wolfson. If you would like to purchase this book, click here. 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