It's going to take a few days for me to get through all of the articles on his site. I added the book to my Amazon wish list, and it will get bundled into my next Amazon splurge. I have a fairly robust collection of religion books and texts, everything from a copy of the Jerusalem Bible to GNOSIS to my Biblical Hebrew textbook to Chu Hsi's Reflections of Things on Hand, the fundamental text on Later Sung Neo-Confucian thought. I'll buy it, read it, and it will live on my shelf with my other strange books, maybe next to my weirdo Kabbalah texts.
I haven't stepped foot into a Temple since maybe 1993, when I gave up on Reform Judaism as being "too silly," but what this book says interests me greatly. Judaism is different from Christianity in ways that are difficult to articulate, except that it's a proactive religion, not a reactive religion. Jews are not a passive audience to a man standing on a pulpit. It is an intellectual and communal religion. Everything in Judaism is community. You can be born a Christian, but you're born a Jew and a Jew you will be until you die. When two Jews meet, they start a strange dance to figure out where their common ancestor is and who married who and if they are some kind of cousin.
Anyway, I can go on about the Judaism vs. Christianity and intellectualizing religion for hours and hours and hours. It's my Near Eastern Studies background from Michigan, hidden deep within my engineering shell. It'll take me a few days to digest all the material.
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I haven't stepped foot into a Temple since maybe 1993, when I gave up on Reform Judaism as being "too silly," but what this book says interests me greatly. Judaism is different from Christianity in ways that are difficult to articulate, except that it's a proactive religion, not a reactive religion. Jews are not a passive audience to a man standing on a pulpit. It is an intellectual and communal religion. Everything in Judaism is community. You can be born a Christian, but you're born a Jew and a Jew you will be until you die. When two Jews meet, they start a strange dance to figure out where their common ancestor is and who married who and if they are some kind of cousin.
Anyway, I can go on about the Judaism vs. Christianity and intellectualizing religion for hours and hours and hours. It's my Near Eastern Studies background from Michigan, hidden deep within my engineering shell. It'll take me a few days to digest all the material.