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RELIGION

New & Forthcoming

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Un i v e r s i ty Pre ss

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2015

Weird John Brown

Hasidism Incarnate

Ethics as a Work of Charity

Divine Violence and the Limits


of Ethics

Hasidism, Christianity, and the


Construction of Modern Judaism

Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue

Ted A. Smith

Shaul Magid

Conventional wisdom holds that


attempts to combine religion and
politics will produce unlimited violence. Concepts such as jihad, crusade,
and sacrifice need to be rooted out,
the story goes, for the sake of more
bounded and secular understandings
of violence. Ted Smith upends this
dominant view, drawing on Walter
Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and
others to trace the ways that seemingly
secular politics produce their own
forms of violence without limit. He
brings this argument to lifeand
digs deep into the American political
imaginationthrough a string of
surprising reflections on John Brown,
the nineteenth-century abolitionist
who took up arms against the state in
the name of a higher law. Smith argues
that the key to limiting violence is not
its separation from religion, but its
connection to richer and more critical
modes of religious reflection.

Hasidism Incarnate contends that


much of modern Judaism in the West
developed in reaction to Christianity
and in defense of Judaism as a unique
tradition. Ironically enough, this
occurred even as modern Judaism increasingly dovetailed with Christianity
with regard to its ethos, aesthetics, and
attitude toward ritual and faith. Shaul
Magid argues that the Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe constitutes an
alternative modernity, one that opens
a new window on Jewish theological
history. Unlike Judaism in German
lands, Hasidism did not develop under
a Christian gaze and had no need
to be apologetic of its positions. Unburdened by an apologetic agenda (at
least toward Christianity), it offered a
particular reading of medieval Jewish
Kabbalah filtered through a focus on
the charismatic leader that resulted in
a religious worldview that has much in
common with Christianity.

Most of us wonder how to make sense


of the apparent moral excellences or
virtues of those who have different
visions of the good life or different
religious commitments than our own.
Rather than flattening or ignoring
the deep difference between various
visions of the good life, as is so often
done, this book turns to the medieval
Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas
to find a better way. Thomas, it argues,
shows us how to welcome the outsider
and her virtue as an expression rather
than a betrayal of ones own distinctive vision. It shows how Thomas,
driven by a Christian commitment
to charity and especially informed by
Augustine, synthesized Augustinian
and Aristotelian elements to construct
an ethics that does justicein loveto
insiders and outsiders alike. Decosimo
offers the first analysis of Thomas on
pagan virtue and a reinterpretation
of Thomass ethics while providing a
model for our own efforts.

224 pp., 7 illustrations, 2014


9780804793308 Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
9780804788502 Cloth $75.00 $60.00 sale

288 pp., 2014


9780804791304 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

376 pp., 2014


9780804790635 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

David Decosimo

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favorite e-reading platform. Visit www.sup.org/ebooks for a complete
list of offerings, as well as e-book rental and bundle options.

E n c o u n t ering Tr a d i t ion s

His Hiding Place Is Darkness

A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of
Divine Absence
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.

His Hiding Place is Darkness explores


the uncertainties of faith and love
in a pluralistic age. In keeping with
his conviction that studying multiple
religious traditions intensifies rather
than attenuates religious devotion,
Francis Clooneys latest work of
comparative theology seeks a way
beyond todays religious and interreligious uncertainty by pairing a fresh
reading of the absence of the beloved
in the Biblical Song of Songs with a
pioneering study of the same theme in
the Holy Word of Mouth (9th century
CE), a classic of Hindu mystical poetry
rarely studied in the West.
Remarkably, the pairing of these texts
is grounded not in a general theory of
religion, but in an engagement with
two unexpected sources: the theopoetics, theodramatics, and theology of
the 20th-century Catholic theologian
Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the
intensely perceived and written poetry
of Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.
208 pp., 2013
9780804776813 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
9780804776806 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

Opus Dei

Pilate and Jesus

An Archaeology of Duty
Giorgio Agamben
Translated by Adam Kotsko

In this follow-up to The Kingdom and


the Glory and The Highest Poverty,
Agamben investigates the roots of
our moral concept of duty in the
theory and practice of Christian liturgy.
Beginning with the New Testament
and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals,
Agamben traces the Churchs attempts
to repeat Christs unrepeatable sacrifice.
In modernity, Agamben argues, the
Christian priest has become the model
ethical subject. We see this above all
in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the
Christian and modern ontology of
duty with the classical ontology of
being, Agamben contends that Western
philosophy has unfolded in the tension
between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political
structures begun in Homo Sacer is a
contribution to the study of liturgy, an
extension of Nietzsches genealogy of
morals, and a reworking of Heideggers
history of Being.

Giorgio Agamben
Translated by Adam Kotsko

Pontius Pilate is one of the most enigmatic figures in Christian theology.


The only non-Christian to be named
in the Nicene Creed, he is presented as
a cruel colonial overseer in secular accounts, as a conflicted judge convinced
of Jesuss innocence in the Gospels,
and as either a pious Christian or
a virtual demon in later Christian
writings. This book takes Pilates role
in the trial of Jesus as a starting point
for investigating the function of legal
judgment in Western society and the
ways that such judgment requires us to
adjudicate the competing claims of the
eternal and the historical. Coming just
as Agamben is bringing his decadeslong Homo Sacer project to an end,
Pilate and Jesus sheds considerable
light on what is at stake in that series
as a whole.
80 pp., 2015
9780804794541 Paper $15.95 $12.76 sale
9780804792332 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale

164 pp., 2013


9780804784047 Paper $17.95 $14.36 sale
9780804784030 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale

Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

Faith as an Option

Possible Futures for Christianity


Hans Joas

Many people these days regard


religion as outdated and are unable to
understand how believers can intellectually justify their faith. Nonbelievers
have long assumed that progress
in technology and the sciences
renders religion irrelevant. Believers,
in contrast, see religion as vital to
societys spiritual and moral wellbeing. But does modernization lead
to secularization? Does secularization
lead to moral decay? Sociologist Hans
Joas argues that these two supposed
certainties have kept scholars from
serious contemporary debate and that
people must put these old arguments
aside in order for debate to move
forward. The emergence of a secular
option does not mean that religion
must decline, but that even believers
must now define their faith as one
option among many.
In this book, Joas spells out some of
the consequences of the abandonment
of conventional assumptions for
contemporary religion and develops
an alternative to the clich of an
inevitable conflict between Christianity and modernity.
204 pp., 2014
9780804792776 Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
9780804788731 Cloth $70.00 $56.00 sale

Radical Equality

Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk


of Democracy
Aishwary Kumar

B.R. Ambedkar, the author of Indias


constitution, and Indian nationalist
M.K. Gandhi, the two figures whose
policies and legacies have most
contributed to Indian democracy, are
typically considered antagonists who
held irreconcilable views of empire
and political and social reform. As
such, they are rarely studied together.
This book reassesses their complex
relationship, focusing on what it
identifies as a mutual commitment to
unconditional equality as inseparable
from the struggle for sovereignty.
These two major nonwestern thinkers
inherited the concept of equality from
Western humanism, but their ideas
mark a radical turn in secular and
humanist conceptions of politics. This
history of their encounter traces the
philosophical foundations of their
thought in Indian and Western traditions, both religious and secular. But
more than a study of an encounter,
Radical Equality explores the paradoxes
and risks of democracy in modern
political thought.
416 pp., 2015
9780804791953 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

C u lt u r a l M emor y in t he P re s en t

The Mark of the Sacred


Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Translated by M. B. DeBevoise

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he


calls enlightened doomsaying, has
long warned that modern society is
on a path to self-destruction. In this
book, he pleads for a subversion of
this crisis from within, arguing that
it is our lopsided view of religion and
reason that has set us on this course.
In denial of our sacred origins and
hubristically convinced of the powers
of human reason, we cease to know
our own limits: our disenchanted
world leaves us defenseless against a
headlong rush into the abyss of global
warming, nuclear holocaust, and the
other catastrophes that loom on our
horizon. Written by one of the deepest
and most versatile thinkers of our time,
it militates for a world where reason is
no longer an enemy of faith.
240 pp., 2013
9780804776905 Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
9780804776899 Cloth $70.00 $56.00 sale

New Series

Spiritual

Phenomena

features investigations
of events, experiences,
and objects, both un-

usual and everyday, that


people characterize as
spiritual, paranormal,

magical, occult and/or


supernatural. Working
from the presupposi-

tion that the status of


such phenomena is

Religion in Public

Lockes Political Theology


Elizabeth A. Pritchard

John Lockes theory of toleration is


generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation
has become conventional wisdom:
secularization is widely understood as
entailing the privatization of religion,
and the separation of religion from
power. This book turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues
that Locke secularizes religion, that is,
makes it worldly, public, and political.
In the name of diverse citizenship,
Locke reconstructs religion as
persuasion, speech, and fashion. He
insists on a consensus that human
rights are sacred insofar as humans
are the creatures, and thus, the property of God. Drawing on a range of
sources beyond Lockes own writings,
Pritchard portrays the secular not as
religions separation from power, but
rather as its affiliation with subtler, and
sometimes insidious, forms of power.
As a result, she captures a range of
anxieties and conflicts attending
religions secularization.
248 pp., 2013
9780804785761 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
9780804785754 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

Convulsing Bodies

Religion and Resistance in


Foucault
Mark D. Jordan

By using religion to get at the core


concepts of Michel Foucaults thinking,
this book offers a strong alternative to
the way that the philosophers work is
read across the humanities. Foucault
was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics
and the parent of modern discipline
and was always alert to the hypocrisy
and the violence in churches. Yet
many readers have ignored how
central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies
and how they are shaped. The point is
not to turn Foucault into some sort of
believer or to extract from him a fixed
thesis about religion as such. Rather,
it is to see how Foucault engages
religious rhetoric page after page.
Arguing that Foucault conducts
experiments in writing to frustrate
academic expectations about history
and theory, Mark Jordan gives equal
weight to the performative and
theatrical aspects of Foucaults writing
or lecturing.
272 pp., 2014
9780804792769 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
9780804789028 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

contested, it seeks to

understand how such


determinations are

made in a variety of

historical and cultural

contexts. Books in the


series explore how

such phenomena are

identified, experienced
and understood; the
role that spontaneity
and cultivation play in
the process; and the
similarities and differences in the way phenomena are appraised
and categorized across
time and cultures. The
editors particularly
encourage work that
is ethnographic, historical, or psychological, and, in particular,
work that uses more
than one method to
understand these
complex phenomena.

A d d i t ion a l N ew Ti t le s in R eligion

The Jews and the Bible


Jean-Christophe Attias

Despite its deceptively simple title, this


book ponders the thorny issue of the
place of the Bible in Jewish religion
and culture. By thoroughly examining
the complex link that the Jews have
formed with the Bible, Jewish scholar
Jean-Christophe Attias raises the
uncomfortable question of whether it
is still relevant for them.
Jews and the Bible reveals how the Jews
define themselves in various times
and places with the Bible, without
the Bible, and against the Bible. Is it
divine revelation or national myth?
Literature or legislative code? One
book or a disparate library? Text or
object? For the Jews, over the past two
thousand years or more, the Bible has
been all that and much more. Like
the Koran, the Bible has never been
anything other than what its readers
make of it. But what theyve made of
it tells a fascinating story and raises
provocative philosophical and ethical
questions.
Stanford Studies in Jewish
History and Culture

256 pp., 2014


9780804793193 Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
9780804789073 Cloth $75.00 $60.00 sale

Pious Practice and Secular


Constraints

Women in the Islamic Revival


in Europe
Jeanette S. Jouili

The visible increase in religious


practice among young European-born
Muslims has provoked public anxiety.
New government regulations seek
not only to restrict Islamic practices
within the public sphere, but also to
shape Muslims, and especially womens,
personal conduct. Pious Practice and
Secular Constraints chronicles the
everyday ethical struggles of women
active in orthodox and socially conservative Islamic revival circles as they are
torn between their quest for a pious
lifestyle and their aspirations to counter negative representations of Muslims
within the mainstream society.
Jeanette S. Jouili conducted fieldwork
in France and Germany to investigate
how pious Muslim women grapple
with religious expression: for example,
when to wear a headscarf, where to pray
throughout the day, and how to maintain
modest interactions between men and
women. Her analysis stresses the various
ethical dilemmas the women confronted
in negotiating these religious duties
within a secular public sphere.
296 pp., 2015
9780804794664 Paper $27.95 $22.36 sale
9780804792875 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale

A d d i t ion a l N ew Ti t le s in R eligion

Judaism in Transition

How Economic Choices Shape


Religious Tradition
Carmel U. Chiswick

At the core of Judaism stands a body


of traditions that have remained
consistent over millennia. Yet, the
practice of these rituals has varied
widely across historical and cultural
contexts. In Judaism in Transition,
Carmel U. Chiswick draws on her
Jewish upbringing, her journey as a
Jewish parent, and her perspective as
an economist to consider how incentives affect the ways that mainstream
American Jews have navigated and
continue to manage the conflicting
demands of everyday life and religious
observance.
The history of American Jews is almost
always told as a success story in the
secular world. Chiswick recasts this
story as one of innovation in order to
maintain a distinctive Jewish culture
while keeping pace with the steady
march of American life. She shows
how tradeoffs, often made on an
individual and deeply personal level,
produce the brand of Judaism which
predominates in America today.
248 pp., 2 tables, 8 figures, 2014
9780804776059 Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
9780804776042 Cloth $75.00 $60.00 sale

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Old Texts, New Practices

Islamic Reform in Modern


Morocco
Etty Terem

In 1910, al-Mahdi al-Wazzani, a


prominent Moroccan Islamic scholar
completed his massive compilation of
Maliki fatwas. An eleven-volume set,
it was the most extensive collection of
fatwas written and published in the
Arab Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Al-Wazzanis legal opinions addressed
practical concerns and questions:
What are the ethical and legal duties
of Muslims residing under European
rule? Is emigration from non-Muslim
territory an absolute duty? Is it ethical
for Muslim merchants to travel to
Europe? Is it legal to consume European-manufactured goods? It was his
expectation that these fatwas would
help the Muslim community navigate
the modern world.
This book is about the creative
process of transforming Islamic law
to guarantee the survival of a Muslim
community in a changing world. It is
the first book to treat Islamic revival
and reform from discourses informed
by the sociolegal concerns that shaped
the daily lives of ordinary people.
248 pp., 5 illustrations, 2 maps, 2014
9780804787079 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

The Zohar

Pritzker Edition, Volume Eight


Translation and Commentary
by Daniel C. Matt

Sefer ha-Zohar has amazed readers


ever since it emerged in medieval Spain
over seven hundred years ago. Written
in lyrical Aramaic, this masterpiece of
Kabbalah exceeds the dimensions of a
normal book; it is virtually a body of
mystical literature, comprising over
twenty sections. The bulk of the Zohar
consists of mystical interpretation
of the Torah, from Genesis through
Deuteronomy. This eighth volume of
The Zohar: Pritzker Edition consists of
commentary on the end of Leviticus and
the beginning of Numbers.
The Zohar: Pritzker Edition

608 pp., 1 illustration, 2014


9780804787260 Cloth $55.00 $44.00 sale

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