Bøker av Charles David Isbell

Sara is a lovely widow. When her non-Jewish husband of 25 years died of cancer, she found her new single life baffling and began to search for a path back to the Judaism of her childhood. Her search brought her into contact with Rabbi Baraq Broulliette, whose own difficult times had left him alone in a world of university teaching and scholarship, Jewish worship, and the tutoring of bar and bat mitzvah candidates. Throughout a year of counselling, the rabbi and the widow become fast friends, and each discovers that the other is playing an important role in the healing that is necessary following their grief, illness, and loss of cherished loved ones. But counsellors do not become romantically involved with their patients, and patients must guard against the costly mistake of "transference," imagining that the professional who listens and understands their problems is the person whom they should love. How can the rabbi and the widow handle the delicate and mystifying effects of their mutual trust in each other? Can the grizzled rabbi and the lovely widow remain friends? Or will their relationship be a temporary detour on the road back to wholeness and perhaps new romantic possibilities? The story takes a surprising twist as it winds towards a conclusion that neither one could have foreseen.

How Jews and Christians Interpret Their Sacred Texts is a comparative textual study that demonstrates the connections between the Hebrew Scriptures, sacred to both Judaism and Christianity, and the Jewish Talmud and Christian New Testament, which respectively became the bases for all modern systems of the two faiths. Even as official interpretations changed from ""plain sense"" to more elaborate explications, commentators in both faith systems continued to hold to the position that their conclusions were not only based firmly upon the initial authoritative text, but were in fact the natural extension and continuation of it. To describe these classical and early post-classical appropriations, Isbell discusses the ""transvaluation"" of texts, or efforts to retain the core values of authoritative sacred texts that are bound to specific times and situations while seeking to extrapolate from these ancient documents meanings that are relevant to current faith and praxis. As Isbell shows, transvaluation presupposes both the freedom and the necessity of reinterpreting perceived timeless teachings in light of historical, theological, sociological, and political developments that occurred long after the composition of the texts themselves.Charles David Isbell is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Louisiana State University. He has authored more than two hundred scholarly articles and eight books, the most recent of which is Sermons from a Southern Rabbi (2009).