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    Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich and Heschel
    Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich and Heschel
    Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich and Heschel
    Ebook144 pages1 hour

    Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich and Heschel

    By Daniel F. Polish, Ph.D.

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    Challenge Yourself to Delve into a Deeper Interfaith Dialogue

    "To wrestle with the ideas these thinkers present is to find ourselves challenged to look at our own religious lives in new ways; and to appreciate the spiritual endeavors of others, whatever form their religious expression may take. To engage with these thinkers can leave us enlarged in our perception of human religiousness and deepened in our appreciation of it."
    —from the Conclusion

    The modern age of religion is characterized by dialogue. Jews and Christians together explore the realities and meaning of living in proximity to one another. Yet for all the good will and sincerity of intention, too often such discussions fail to progress beyond well-intentioned pleasantries to the challenging content that can truly deepen our understanding of each other.

    This fascinating and accessible introduction to the theologies of four modern religious thinkers will help you break through the superficial generalities to plumb the depths of religious differences and embrace the commonalities. Examining the lives and works of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich and Abraham Joshua Heschel through the lens of their treatment of the Bible and the biblical patriarch Abraham, you will take part in a discussion of the very phenomenon of religion and what part it plays in living a fully engaged human life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateNov 16, 2011
    ISBN9781594734069
    Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich and Heschel
    Author

    Daniel F. Polish, Ph.D.

    Daniel F. Polish, frequently teaches interfaith audiences at the Center for Religious Inquiry at St. Bartholomew's Church in New York City. He is author of Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich and Heschel (SkyLight Paths), Bringing the Psalms to Life: How to Understand and Use the Book of Psalms and Keeping Faith with the Psalms: Deepen Your Relationship with God Using the Book of Psalms (both Jewish Lights), and has been a congregational rabbi for over thirty years. Daniel F. Polish is available to speak on the following topics: Jewish-Christian Relations: Accomplishments and Challenge How to Make the Psalms Work for You What Can Four Great Modern Theologians Tell Us about Our Religious Lives? Jewish Religion and the Traditions of the East Abraham, the Father of Three Faiths Click here to contact the author.

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      Book preview

      Talking about God - Daniel F. Polish, Ph.D.

      INTRODUCTION

      Thinking Religiously

      What do we mean by religious thought? Despite fairly widespread misperceptions to the contrary, religion is not the same thing as philosophy. That is, it is not exclusively a matter of understanding. Most of the time our religious identity is tied up in how we live our lives, the rituals we engage in, the holidays we celebrate, and the ways we comport ourselves in the world. Most religious people are not theologians; they are content to live with a less than complete understanding of the ideas or doctrines associated with their faith tradition. But sooner or later most of us come to a point when we wish to have a deeper understanding of the religious way of life we participate in. As often as not, this curiosity is stimulated by the need to justify or explain our faiths to others. Those are the times we turn to the expertise of religious thinkers whose role it is to take the religious tradition we are part of and make sense of it, for ourselves and others.

      WHY BOTHER WITH RELIGIOUS THOUGHT?

      As citizens of a global village we regularly encounter people of different religious backgrounds than our own. They are our neighbors, our friends, perhaps even members of our extended families. We encounter different religious traditions in the news reports that stream into our homes, on the streets of our cities, and in our schools and places of work. Often something about those other religious traditions piques our curiosity, or becomes essential to making sense of an event in our world. At these times, too, we need the expertise of religious thinkers to help us understand the teachings of religious traditions other than our own.

      None of us can be full participants in our own traditions or be fully informed members of our new planetary society without a deeper understanding of the contents of our various traditions. It may even be that to live a fully engaged human life, we need to devote time to understanding what the very phenomenon of religion itself is all about. This, too, is the stuff of religious thought. The thinkers whose work makes up the heart of this book are among the most respected, insightful, and challenging practitioners of their craft in modern times. Their teachings can help us understand ourselves and each other with greater depth and empathy. They inspire us to ponder questions that enlarge all of our intellectual and spiritual horizons.

      WHAT MAKES MODERN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT MODERN?

      What do we mean when we use the adjective modern to describe the works of Kierkegaard, Tillich, Heschel, and Buber? It is not merely a statement about chronology but of attitude. In what way does their work differ from work that we might call pre-modern or traditional? Of the many differences we could enumerate, we will limit ourselves to four.

      The most striking thing about these authors is their self-conscious awareness that they are addressing people who do not necessarily share their beliefs. Traditional theology is addressed to believers; it explicates the faith system that is already acknowledged as true. The modern religious thinker writes with the knowledge that he or she will be read by people whose religious perspectives will be very different from his or her own. The reader might belong to an altogether different religious tradition, or be part of the same tradition but hold radically different perspectives. And in the contemporary age, unlike the ages that preceded it, the reader could be a person of no religious faith whatever. Whatever a modern religious thinker writes must make sense to people who do not share all of his or her assumptions.

      These authors cannot make their case by what we would call an appeal to accepted authority. In pre-modern theology, writers often cite scripture or some other source that is universally accepted by the members of that tradition and have that proof-text establish or affirm the correctness of their opinion. Indeed in both Jewish and Christian traditions, one of the most common forms of religious discussion is commentary on a text that is accepted by that faith community as sacred. In the modern pluralistic setting in which our four authors wrote, such an appeal to authority or canon would not be, in itself, at all persuasive. Thus none of these thinkers takes recourse to that line of reasoning. Accepted tradition, practice, or understanding does not provide a sufficient foundation for their

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