Beyond the Walls: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Edith Stein on the Significance of Empathy for Jewish-Christian Dialogue

ISBN-13: 9780199925025 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 208 str.

Joseph Palmisano

Opis

Joseph Palmisano offers an in-depth examination of the significance of empathy for Jewish-Christian understanding. Drawing on the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) and Edith Stein (1891-1942), he develops a phenomenological category of empathy defined as a way of "re-membering" oneself with the religious other.

Palmisano follows Heschel's and Stein's philosophical theory and praxis through the unprecedented horrors of the Shoah, showing that Heschel's call to Christians for a return to God is an ecumenical call to humanity to embrace perceived others: a call to live life as a response to God's pathos. This call finds a prophetic answer in Edith Stein's witness of empathy when faced with the Shoah. Stein, a Catholic, creates a dialectical bridge with the Jewish "other," neither distancing herself nor denying her Jewish roots. Stein's simultaneously Jewish and Christian fidelity is a model for interreligious relations. It is also a challenge to Catholics to remember their religion's Jewish heritage through new categories of witnessing and belonging with others.

Beyond the Walls is a critical contribution to the fostering of interreligious understanding, offering both a model of the ideal Jewish-Christian relationship in Heschel and Stein and criteria by which to evaluate contemporary initiatives and controversies concerning interreligious dialogue.

Recenzje

This work combines great originality with scholarly rigor. Through his engagement with the works of Heschel and Stein, Palmisano develops what he intriguingly calls 'an inter-religiously attuned phenomenology of empathy.' He draws on his impressive knowledge of Heschel and Stein to provide a reading that is lucid, perceptive and nuanced. Moreover, in forging a hermeneutics from empathy he makes a valuable theological contribution to inter-religious understanding.

O autorze

Inaugural Rev Michael Hurley SJ post-doctoral research and teaching fellow, Irish School of Economics, Trinity College, Dublin