Covenantal Rights

Covenantal Rights
Author: David Novak
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-11-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1400823528

Covenantal Rights is a groundbreaking work of political theory: a comprehensive, philosophically sophisticated attempt to bring insights from the Jewish political tradition into current political and legal debates about rights and to bring rights discourse more fully into Jewish thought. David Novak pursues these aims by presenting a theory of rights founded on the covenant between God and the Jewish people as that covenant is constituted by Scripture and the rabbinic tradition. In doing so, he presents a powerful challenge to prevailing liberal and conservative positions on rights and duties and opens a new chapter in contemporary Jewish political thinking. For Novak, "covenantal rights" are rooted in God's primary rights as creator of the universe and as the elector of a particular community whose members relate to this God as their sovereign. The subsequent rights of individuals and communities flow from God's covenantal promises, which function as irrevocable entitlements. This presents a sharp contrast to the liberal tradition, in which rights flow above all from individuals. It also challenges the conservative idea that duties can take precedence over rights, since Novak argues that there are no covenantal duties that are not backed by correlative rights. Novak explains carefully and clearly how this theory of covenantal rights fits into Jewish tradition and applies to the relationships among God, the covenanted community, and individuals. This work is a profound and provocative contribution to contemporary religious and political theory.

Care and Covenant

Care and Covenant
Author: Jason Tabadoa
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2023-03-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1647123194

A bioethic of obligations and responsibilities, based on the Jewish tradition The Jewish tradition has important perspectives, history, and wisdom that can contribute significantly to crucial contemporary healthcare deliberations. Care and Covenant: A Jewish Bioethic of Responsibility demonstrates how numerous classic Jewish texts can add new ideas to the world of medicine today. Rabbi Jason Weiner draws on fifteen years of experience working in a hospital as a practitioner to develop an “ethic of responsibility.” This book seeks to develop an approach to bioethical dilemmas that is primarily informed by personal and communal obligations as well as social responsibilities. Weiner applies unique and inspiring values found in Judaism to encourage healthcare providers to remain dedicated to preventing harm and providing care to all. Each chapter investigates relevant philosophical questions such as what the expectations of a society or government are and what we should do when our obligations to others violate our own moral principles, safety, or ability to assist. Care and Covenant provides analytical, philosophical, and evidence-based scholarship to guide discussions on ethics in healthcare.

David Novak: Natural Law and Revealed Torah

David Novak: Natural Law and Revealed Torah
Author: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004263446

This volume features the thought and writings of Rabbi David Novak, the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies, Professor of the Study of Religion, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Novak is a leading Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law. Natural Law and Revealed Torah presents the work of Novak, a thinker interested in the intersection of traditional Judaism and the modern world, especially how religious Jews can simultaneously exist within the liberal and democratic nation state yet remain separate from its tradition of secularism.

Irresistible

Irresistible
Author: Andy Stanley
Publisher: Zondervan
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0310536995

A fresh look at the earliest Christian movement reveals what made the new faith so compelling...and what we need to change today to make it so again. Once upon a time there was a version of the Christian faith that was practically irresistible. After all, what could be more so than the gospel that Jesus ushered in? Why, then, isn't it the same with Christianity today? Author and pastor Andy Stanley is deeply concerned with the present-day church and its future. He believes that many of the solutions to our issues can be found by investigating our roots. In Irresistible, Andy chronicles what made the early Jesus Movement so compelling, resilient, and irresistible by answering these questions: What did first-century Christians know that we don't—about God's Word, about their lives, about love? What did they do that we're not doing? What makes Christianity so resistible in today's culture? What needs to change in order to repeat the growth our faith had at its beginning? Many people who leave or disparage the faith cite reasons that have less to do with Jesus than with the conduct of his followers. It's time to hit pause and consider the faith modeled by our first-century brothers and sisters who had no official Bible, no status, and little chance of survival. It's time to embrace the version of faith that initiated—against all human odds—a chain of events resulting in the most significant and extensive cultural transformation the world has ever seen. This is a version of Christianity we must remember and re-embrace if we want to be salt and light in an increasingly savorless and dark world.

The Reformation of Rights

The Reformation of Rights
Author: John Witte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521818427

Calvin's teachings spread rapidly throughout Western Europe shaping the law of early modern Protestant lands.

The Achievement of David Novak

The Achievement of David Novak
Author: Matthew Levering
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-02-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725277093

This book is a Festschrift offered by twelve Catholic theologians and philosophers to the great Jewish theologian David Novak. Each of the twelve essays is followed by a response by David Novak, and it thereby represents a significant addition to his oeuvre. The book includes an introduction by Matthew Levering surveying Novak’s many contributions to Jewish-Christian dialogue, as well as a transcribed conversation between Robert George and David Novak that encapsulates Novak’s sense of the present situation for Jews and Christians. Among the topics treated by the authors are religious engagement in a pluralist and secular culture, the question of whether Jews and Christians worship the same God, the morality of suicide, the role of divine commandments in Catholic moral theology, the question of whether classical versions of natural-law doctrine are susceptible to the critiques proffered by Novak, the pedagogical impact of Dabru Emet, religious freedom, the recent debate about Pope Pius IX and Edgardo Mortara, the nature of justice, the relationship of reason and revelation, the sanctity of human life and the death penalty, and supersessionism.

Imagining the Jewish God

Imagining the Jewish God
Author: Leonard Kaplan
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2016-09-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498517501

Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.

Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective

Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective
Author: John Witte (Jr.)
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2005-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780802829931

Covenant marriages requiring premarital counseling and tighter strictures on divorce have recently emerged in some American states. At the same time, the doctrine of covenant has reemerged in religious circles as a common way to map the spiritual dimensions of marriage. Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective brings together eminent scholars from Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Islamic religious traditions as well as experts on American covenant marriage. The introduction carries out an unprecedented comparison of contract and covenant in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim understandings of marriage. The rest of the book elucidates various facets of marriage from the perspectives of both jurisprudence and religion, producing an enlightening integrated picture of the legal and spiritual dimensions of marriage.

Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible

Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible
Author: Mira Morgenstern
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1624664636

Inspired by the Enlightenment readings of Hebrew biblical texts generated in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, Mira Morgenstern's Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible goes beyond the pioneering interpretations of various biblical texts penned by such noted Bible students as Spinoza, Rousseau, and Angelina Grimké to present an introduction to the Hebrew Bible as a whole from the perspective of a modern-day political theorist. In doing so, it offers a brilliant thematic guide to the Hebrew Bible's most politically salient passages, complete with text and commentary. Morgenstern's account of the significance of these ancient yet strangely modern texts will fascinate students of both ancient and modern political theory—as well as all readers of the Hebrew Bible itself.

Unjust Deeds

Unjust Deeds
Author: Jeffrey D. Gonda
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2015-08-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469625466

In 1945, six African American families from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., began a desperate fight to keep their homes. Each of them had purchased a property that prohibited the occupancy of African Americans and other minority groups through the use of legal instruments called racial restrictive covenants--one of the most pervasive tools of residential segregation in the aftermath of World War II. Over the next three years, local activists and lawyers at the NAACP fought through the nation's courts to end the enforcement of these discriminatory contracts. Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of their dramatic campaign, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court victory in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Restoring this story to its proper place in the history of the black freedom struggle, Jeffrey D. Gonda's groundbreaking study provides a critical vantage point to the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal activism in the twentieth century and offers a new understanding of the evolving legal fight against Jim Crow in neighborhoods and courtrooms across America.