Forgiveness and Theodicy After Auschwitz

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in Aiolos. To access the final edited and published work see http://www.aiolos.info/This article addresses questions regarding the possibility of forgiveness after Auschwitz

The Rabbi on the Train: Reflections on Forgiveness

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Jewish Quartely on 02/10/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0449010X.2015.1084699This essay explores the theme of forgiveness in 20th century Jewish thought

Topos and Utopia: The place of art in the Revolution

This is the author's post-refereed, pre-print version of an article published by Rodopi, 2014, reproduced with kind permission from Koninklijke Brill.This book chapter discusses nationalism, art, and the invention of aniconism; the Bezalel School; and the Vitebsk School

Putting Away Childish Things: Incidents of \u3ci\u3eRecovery\u3c/i\u3e in Tolkien and Haddon

Applies the concept of Recovery from Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” to an unusual subject—Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel about a young boy with Asperger’s Syndrome

Dissenting from Redemption: Judaism and Political Theology

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in European Judaism. To access the final edited and published work see http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2017.500106.Beginning from a critique of Schmitt’s description of "secularised theological concepts" as insufficiently attentive to implicit religion, this paper utilises the concept of redemption as understood within Judaism and Christianity in order to investigate the problematique of inter-religious dialogue that is founded on “shared language”. It argues that political theology’s excessive attention to explicit forms of religion fails to account for the important role theological concepts play in forming implicit, unexamined pre-philosophical attitudes about the way the world works, and thus gives rise to a problematic illusion of shared values.Beginning from a critique of Schmitt’s description of "secularised theological concepts" as insufficiently attentive to implicit religion, this paper utilises the concept of redemption as understood within Judaism and Christianity in order to investigate the problematique of inter-religious dialogue that is founded on “shared language”. It argues that political theology’s excessive attention to explicit forms of religion fails to account for the important role theological concepts play in forming implicit, unexamined pre-philosophical attitudes about the way the world works, and thus gives rise to a problematic illusion of shared values

The Necessity of a Jewish Systematic Theology

Taking into account current disputes about the nature of theology and religious studies, both inside and outside of the academy, this article argues that the academic discipline of theology would benefit greatly by expanding its religious remit beyond the traditional field of Christian Systematic Theology to include constructive-critical insider engagement with the texts of other traditions--e.g., Jewish and Islamic theology

Memorialisation and Jewish Theology in the 20th and 21st centuries: monument, narrative, liturgy

This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between the understanding of the past and the practice of theology. It is built around three major case studies: the history of interpretation of the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17-19), the commemoration of the First World War in Canada, and the development of post-Holocaust theology. Linking these cases are issues of theological response to (or justification for) violence, and tensions between individual and collective identity. Part I focuses on Deuteronomy 25:17-19, and the internal contradiction between the commandments to remember and blot out the memory of Amalek. The passage is analysed both in terms of language and reception history, with special attention paid to Rabbinic interpretations from the 19th and 20th centuries (sermons and commentaries generated during or immediately after the German Reform movement, the American Civil War, and the Nazi occupation of Poland). This reading prompts two further strands of analysis, which are pursued separately: the distinction between the remembering commanded in the passage and concepts of memory active in the Western philosophical tradition prior to the 20th century, and the place this passage has in a larger tradition of religious and secular discourse on acceptable justifications for violence, again in both Jewish and more broadly Western thought. Part II takes up these themes, beginning with an historically contextualised reading of two versions of Antigone—one written by Sophocles in the early days of the Athenian Empire, and the other by Jean Anouilh during the Second World War. Both of these focus on a dead body as the site of ideological contestation between divergent identity narratives—a conflict that is also apparent in negotiations over the memorialisation of the First World War, which is the main focus of this part. A close reading of novels from L. M. Montgomery‘s Anne of Green Gables series, published before, during, and just after the war reveals that the First World War partly destabilised the individual-focused structures of memorialisation that were in place prior to its beginning, in favour of structures which enforced the collective identity of the soldiers who died in the war; while much of this instability could be (and was) addressed in existing theological language, the war nevertheless left a mark on Canadian society and religious practice. This part concludes with an examination of the Canadian National Monument at Vimy, conducted via archival documentation of the monument‘s design and construction and then through a reading of The Stone Carvers, a recent novel which re-imagines the circumstances documented in the archives through the eyes of one war veteran and his family. This dual reading also demonstrates the instability of memorials, the tendency of their meaning to shift over time. Part III commences with a discussion of the shift in memorial forms precipitated by the Holocaust. I contend that the tendency to memorialise the Holocaust with complex museum narratives betrays an anxiety about the intended audience of these memorials, which points in turn to the degree to which the Holocaust upset previous cultural and religious worldviews. This section focuses on theological and literary attempts to record and respond to the ruptures caused by the Holocaust, with specific reference to two recent novels by Jewish Candian women which, taken together, provide a constructive interruption to overly tidy narratives of national and religious identity

The work of creation: Image, idolatry, and Jewish discourse in theology and the arts

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Literature and Theology following peer review. The version of record [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/litthe/frv022The Second Commandment, prohibiting both the worship and manufacture of graven images, is often employed as a mechanism for explaining a perceived absence of Jewish participation in the visual arts, in spite of a well recorded history of Jewish participation in the manufacture of graven images which are typically classed as craft objects. This article aims to introduce to theology the scepticism towards hierarchical distinctions between art and craft which is already familiar in the world of art theory, and by so doing prompt a dislocation of theological reflection on works of art from the point of visual engagement to the point of manufacture. It suggests that attentiveness to Jewish discourses about material production opens up interesting and potentially generative possibilities for work in theology and the arts beyond the consideration of specifically Jewish art

Ecclesiasticus, War Graves, and the secularization of British Values

This article reads the design of the British Imperial War Graves cemeteries in the context of the religious pluralism of the late Empire. Reviewing the deliberations of the design committee and parliamentary debates on the design of the cemeteries, it notes that the Christian character of the cemeteries was relatively muted, a design decision which caused no small amount of public and political controversy, but which permitted the cemeteries to present an image of a unified Empire. The paper argues that the choice of quotations specifically from the apocrypha was an important and deliberate aspect of this presentational strategy

Speakers for the Dead: digital memory and the construction of identity

In the wake of the killing of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, thousands of individuals—many of whom had never before seen a copy of the paper—changed their Facebook statuses, profile pictures, or Twitter updates to “Je suis Charlie.” A month previously, a similar outpouring of digital sentiment took place in response to a New York grand jury’s decision not to indict police officers who had been filmed choking Eric Garner to death: #icantbreathe. These two events are, of course, not unique—one might also note Le Monde’s editorial headline on 12 September 2001, “Nous sommes tous Americains”, or even John F. Kennedy’s 1963 declaration “Ich bin ein Berliner”—but they are exemplary of an increasing tendency towards the appropriation of another’s identity as a ritual of public mourning. This paper considers these appropriative rituals in a wider historical context of memorialisation as constitutive of collective identity, arguing that, while the internet did not originate this ritual of remembrance via appropriation, its increasing dominance is a consequence of the immediacy and international nature of digital culture. It then presents an analysis of the politics of the “us” which results from these commemorative rituals, making some suggestions about whether, and how, the problematic notion of collective identity is transforming in the digital age