Community, Liberalism and Christian Ethics

✍ Scribed by David Herbert

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 54 KB
• Volume: 30
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0048-721X
• DOI: 10.1006/reli.1999.0215

✦ Synopsis

lack, loss, scarcity, competition for goods, fear of the power of the father and desire for the father. No less than Freud, she traces culture back to Moses. The author's work is both scholarly and political, a politic of memory and identity. She does not back away from the dark personal and political implications of monotheism, but she also sees the possibility and need for rewriting in every reading. In a closing figure that she draws from Ezekiel, she likens biblical texts to bones. Bones can come to life. Missing bones, Moses or Jesus, suggest the possibility of ascension. There can be re-vision, new thinking.

Schwartz wants to close the 'monotheistic' Bible without denying its reality. She wants new books, a multiplicity of books, that subvert the dominant vision of violence and scarcity and allow for the forging of identity in an 'ideal of plenitude and its corollary ethical imperative of generosity'. She writes that she longs to imagine (with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze) a vision that opposes the universal, turns the multiple into substantive multiplicities, and thinks in likenesses and analogies. What she brings to this longing is the memory of the textual reality of biblical narrative.