Steven Kepnes

This title provides an articulation of the philosophical ethical, and theological reasoning of synagogue liturgies. The book uses insights from modern Jewish philosophy together with contemporary hermeneutics, semiotics, and postliberal theology to develop new terms of discourse and a new sensibility for 21st-century Jewish philosophy.

In Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy, three preeminent Jewish thinkers debate the form and meaning of Jewish philosophy now that the great secular ideologies of modern western civilization have lost their hegemony. Emulating the methods and the premises of Talmudic argument, the authors present their responses as dialogues joined by a common love of the rabbinic tradition of biblical commentary and interpretation. The composers, Steven Kepnes, Peter Ochs, and Robert Gibbs, contemplate where Judaism has been - and where it is headed.

The Text as Thou establishes Martin Buber's central concept of "I-Thou" as the heart of a dialogical theory of textual interpretation and a narrative method for explicating Jewish philosophy and theology. Part One takes up Buber's application of his hermeneutic method to the texts of Hasidism and the Bible and the way in which that method can be applied to secular texts as well. His development of a dialogical hermeneutics links Buber to such contemporary theorists as Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Bakhtin. Part Two demonstrates that narrative provides privileged access to Buber's thought. By the retelling of Hasidic tales, biblical stories, and autobiographical anecdotes with powerful immediacy and concreteness, Buber succeeds in a daring attempt to formulate a modern narrative Jewish theology. Taken together, Buber's dialogical hermeneutics and narrative theology constitute a key element in the contemporary revival of the Jewish midrashic imagination.

"Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology Steven Kepnes The reader will find here, in this Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology, essays by leading Jewish Studies scholars that display the Jewish theological tradition as long, sustained, complex, and deep. This collection aims to show this with essays that cover the full historical span of Judaism from the Biblical through to the contemporary periods. Each essay is a gem filled with not only an overview of a topic that employs and reviews the best in contemporary scholarship, but also brings important new insights to it. One thing that will become obvious for the reader is the variety of theological approaches that Jews have taken to presenting and understanding God. For example, on the crucial issue of revelation, Alan Brill presents us with seven models of revelation in modern Jewish theology. I should also say, from the outset, that Jewish theology encompasses not only the issue of the nature of God but also the dynamic of inter-relations between God and humans and God and the world. I have attempted to focus the attention of my authors mainly on God but, quite naturally, a number of authors also discuss the relations between God and humans, God and the world. Here, for example, a figure like Emmanuel Levinas stands out for wanting to focus almost exclusively on ethical relations between humans"--