God of Abraham [Hardcover]

This cogently argued and richly illustrated book rejects the dichotomy between the God of Abraham and the God of the philosophers to argue that the two are one. InGod of Abraham, one of our leading philosophers of religion shows how human values can illuminate our idea of God and how the monotheistic idea of God in turn illuminates our moral, social, cultural, aesthetic, and even ritual understanding. Throughout Goodman draws on a wealth of traditional, philosophical, historical, and anthropological materials, and particularly on a wide range of Jewish sources. He demonstrates how an adequate understanding of the interplay of values with monotheism dissolves many of the longstanding problems of natural theology and ethics and guides us toward a genuinely humanistic moral and social philosophy.

It is indeed rare to hear a voice equally at home in theology and logic, in Judaica, Islamic studies, and western philosophy. Lenn Goodman's ambitious, deeply felt argument bears on the relations between the existence of God and the concept of values in ethics. The main focus is that of Jewish monotheism ('the God of Abraham') and the code of moral conduct established by Mosaic law, the Torah, and certain of the great rabbinic interpretations from Maimonides to the present. But Islamic analogues and the metaphysical-ethical thought of Aristotle and of Kant are prominent and illuminating throughout. This is a treatise at once finely 'old-fashioned' in its didactic gravity and modern in its range of reference. A book to be listened to. --George Steiner,Cambridge University

Learning is joined to elegance of expression in an argument that follows the way of the mind to the truth by which it is transcended and in which it knows itself. Where the author distances Jewish from Christian thought, the Christian thinker is provoked to think more carefully. -- The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, President ofReligion and Public Life.

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