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Author Lazier, Benjamin, 1971- author.

Title God interrupted : heresy and the European imagination between the world wars / Benjamin Lazier.

Publication Info. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2008]
©2008

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xiv, 254 pages)
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Note Includes index.
Contents The Gnostic return -- God interrupted: Romans in Weimar -- Overcoming Gnosticism -- After Auschwitz, earth -- Pantheism revisited -- The Pantheism controversy -- From God to nature -- Natural right and Judaism -- Redemption through sin -- Jewish Gnosticism -- Raising Pantheism -- From nihilism to nothingness -- Scholem's golem.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-244) and index.
Summary Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the interruption of his call. In response, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the two most potent challenges to the monotheistic tradition. In God Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the ensuing debates about the divine across confessions and disciplines. He also traces the surprising afterlives of these debates in postwar arguments about the environment, neoconservative politics, and heretical forms of Jewish identity. In lively, elegant prose, the book reorients the intellectual history of the era. God Interrupted also provides novel accounts of three German-Jewish thinkers whose ideas, seminal to fields typically regarded as wildly unrelated, had common origins in debates about heresy between the wars. Hans Jonas developed a philosophy of biology that inspired European Greens and bioethicists the world over. Leo Strauss became one of the most important and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion, radically recast what it means to be a Jew. Together they help us see how talk about God was adapted for talk about nature, politics, technology, and art. They alert us to the abiding salience of the divine to Europeans between the wars and beyond--even among those for whom God was long missing or dead.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Jonas, Hans, 1903-1993.
Jonas, Hans, 1903-1993.
Scholem, Gershom, 1897-1982.
Scholem, Gershom, 1897-1982.
Strauss, Leo.
Strauss, Leo.
Jonas, Hans Philosoph.
Scholem, Gershom.
Strauss, Leo.
God (Judaism) -- History of doctrines -- 20th century.
God (Judaism) -- History of doctrines.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Jewish philosophy -- 20th century.
Jewish philosophy.
Heresy -- History -- 20th century.
Heresy.
History.
Pantheism -- History -- 20th century.
Pantheism.
Gnosticism -- History -- 20th century.
Gnosticism.
Europe -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.
Europe.
Intellectual life.
Chronological Term 1900 - 1999
Genre/Form Electronic books.
History.
Other Form: Print version: Lazier, Benjamin, 1971- God interrupted. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©2008 9780691136707 (DLC) 2008005405 (OCoLC)212375652
ISBN 9781400837656 (electronic book)
1400837650 (electronic book)
9780691136707
069113670X