A Year with Mordecai Kaplan

A Year with Mordecai Kaplan
Author: Steven Carr Reuben
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0827617836

You are invited to spend a year with the inspirational words, ideas, and counsel of the great twentieth-century thinker Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, through his meditations on the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and eleven Jewish holidays. A pioneer of ideas and action—teaching that “Judaism is a civilization” encompassing Jewish culture, art, and peoplehood; demonstrating how synagogues can be full centers for Jewish living (building one of the first “shuls with a pool”); and creating the first-ever bat mitzvah ceremony (for his daughter Judith)—Kaplan transformed the landscape of American Jewry. Yet much of Kaplan’s rich treasury of ethical and spiritual thought is largely unknown. Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, who studied closely with Kaplan, offers unique insight into Kaplan’s teachings about ethical relationships and spiritual fulfillment, including how to embrace godliness in everyday experience, our mandate to become agents of justice in the world, and the human ability to evolve personally and collectively. Quoting from the week’s Torah portion, Reuben presents Torah commentary, a related quotation from Kaplan, a reflective commentary integrating Kaplan’s understanding of the Torah text, and an intimate story about his family or community’s struggles and triumphs—guiding twenty-first-century spiritual seekers of all backgrounds on how to live reflectively and purposefully every day.

The Reconstructionist

The Reconstructionist
Author: Nick Arvin
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2011-12-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1446440354

At a loose end after college, Ellis Barstow drifts back to his hometown and takes a job as a reconstructionist – investigating and recreating the details of fatal car accidents. Ellis forms a bond with his boss John Boggs, who believes that if two cars meeting at an intersection can be called an accident, then anything can – where we live, what we do, even who we fall in love with. For Ellis these things are certainly no accident and he harbours two secrets of his own. The car crash that killed his half-brother is a memory that still haunts him, and his feelings for John’s wife threaten to blow apart the men’s lives. As Ellis tries to make sense of his own life, the story’s momentum builds to a desperate race towards confrontation, reconciliation and survival.

The Reconstructionist

The Reconstructionist
Author: Josephine Hart
Publisher: Arrow
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2003
Genre: Psychiatrists
ISBN: 9780099424338

Coolly and compellingly narrated by a man dedicated to the examination of other people's pasts and the reconstruction of their lives, this is a brilliant, dark and gripping new novel that surpasses even Hart's masterpiece, Damage. A psychiatrist, Jack is divorced. His own past and that of his beautiful, enigmatic sister Kate certainly bear scrutiny. Then he gets a phone call telling him that their family house in Ireland is for sale - and when he finally returns to the house, terrible truths emerge about what happened there years ago in a family tragedy that left indelible marks on those who survived it. The facts have been reconstructed many times, but the shocking truth has not.

Encyclopedia of Judaism

Encyclopedia of Judaism
Author: Sara E. Karesh
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2005
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0816069824

An illustrated A to Z reference containing over 800 entries providing information on the theology, people, historical events, institutions and movements related to the religion of Judaism.

From Ideology to Liturgy

From Ideology to Liturgy
Author: Eric Caplan
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0878207031

In the 2002 edition of From Ideology to Liturgy, Eric Caplan examined Reconstructionism's interpretation and adaptation of the traditional Jewish liturgy and its creation of new prayer texts to convey and express the movement's changing ideology. Further insight into Reconstructionist liturgy was gained through comparing these prayerbooks to the contemporaneous liturgies of Reform and Conservative Judaism and to the work of Jewish Renewal. In this new supplemented reprint edition, Caplan offers an expansive study of liberal Jewish prayerbooks published in the decades since From Ideology to Liturgy first appeared and revisits his earlier conclusions in light of more recent expanded access to Mordecai Kaplan's diaries and archives.

Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development

Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development
Author: Elizabeth M. Dowling
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2006
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0761928839

Focuses on the developmental process of religion and spirituality across the human life span.This encyclopedia joins a recent trend in research and scholarship aimed at better understanding the similarities and differences between world religions and spiritualities, between expressions of the divine and between experiences of the transcendent.

Truth Versus Man’S Religious Systems

Truth Versus Man’S Religious Systems
Author: Terry W. McHenry
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2018-01-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 154347084X

The book in overview is historical and instructional in content, with the focus being on the Biblical text in terms of its original form and language and in consideration of its full and proper context linguistically, textually, historically, culturally, and literarily. It stresses the importance of moving from a knowledge of the Bible to an understanding of its life-giving instructions, being studied in its entirety as a gift to mankind from a loving creator, Elohim. The thrust of the book is accordingly threefold: An indictment of two of mans religious systems (Judaism and Christianity) for syncretism, corruption of Elohims written Word of truth, and abuses of religious authority, plus promulgation of religious traditions not aligned with the whole truth of Elohims Word. A call to return to the one source of truththe written Word of Elohim understood in its originally written form and in its full and proper context. Providing the equipping and study tools necessary to move from a mere knowledge of the Word to an understanding of its life-giving instructionshow to live a redeemed life as Elohim intended for all mankind.