Mark Larrimore – författare

This Reader brings together primary sources from philosophy, theology and literature to chart the many and changing ways evil has been approached and understood, and to examine the diverse implications it has had for belief and unbelief. Will fill a major gap in the publishing market. Provides primary source readings for courses on religion and evil. A key issue in religious thought - this book will change the way the subject is taught. Author is one of the brightest young religious philosophers in America.

The Book of Job raises stark questions about the nature and meaning of innocent suffering and the relationship of the human to the divine, yet it is also one of the Bible's most obscure and paradoxical books, one that defies interpretation even today. Mark Larrimore provides a panoramic history of this remarkable book, traversing centuries and traditions to examine how Job's trials and his challenge to God have been used and understood in diverse contexts, from commentary and liturgy to philosophy and art. Larrimore traces Job's obscure origins and his reception and use in the Midrash, burial liturgies, and folklore, and by figures such as Gregory the Great, Maimonides, John Calvin, Immanuel Kant, William Blake, Margarete Susman, and Elie Wiesel. He chronicles the many ways the Book of Job's interpreters have linked it to other biblical texts; to legends, allegory, and negative and positive theologies; as well as to their own individual and collective experiences. Larrimore revives old questions and provides illuminating new contexts for contemporary ones. Was Job a Jew or a gentile? Was his story history or fable? What is meant by the "patience of Job," and does Job exhibit it?Why does God speak yet not engage Job's questions? Offering rare insights into this iconic and enduring book, Larrimore reveals how Job has come to be viewed as the Bible's answer to the problem of evil and the perennial question of why a God who supposedly loves justice permits bad things to happen to good people.

The life and times of this iconic and enduring biblical bookThe book of Job raises stark questions about the meaning of innocent suffering and the relationship of the human to the divine, yet it is also one of the Bible's most obscure and paradoxical books. Mark Larrimore provides a panoramic history of this remarkable book, traversing centuries and traditions to examine how Job's trials and his challenge to God have been used and understood in diverse contexts, from commentary and liturgy to philosophy and art. Larrimore traces Job's reception by figures such as Gregory the Great, William Blake, and Elie Wiesel, and reveals how Job has come to be viewed as the Bible's answer to the problem of evil and the perennial question of why a God who supposedly loves justice permits bad things to happen to good people.

Illuminates the emergence of race as a central concept in philosophy and the social sciences.In The German Invention of Race, historians, philosophers, and scholars in literary, cultural, and religious studies trace the origins of the concept of "race" to Enlightenment Germany and seek to understand the issues at work in creating a definition of race. The work introduces a significant connection to the history of race theory as contributors show that the language of race was deployed in contexts as apparently unrelated as hygiene; aesthetics; comparative linguistics; anthropology; debates over the status of science, theology, and philosophy; and Jewish emancipation.The concept of race has no single point of origin, and has never operated within the constraints of a single definition. As the essays in this book trace the powerful resonances of the term in diverse contexts, both before and long after the invention of the scientific term around 1775, they help explain how this pseudoconcept could, in a few short decades, have become so powerful in so many fields of thought and practice. In addition, the essays show that the fateful rise of racial thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was made possible not only by the establishment of physical anthropology as a field, but also by other disciplines and agendas linked by the enduring associations of the word "race."

Illuminates the emergence of race as a central concept in philosophy and the social sciences.In The German Invention of Race, historians, philosophers, and scholars in literary, cultural, and religious studies trace the origins of the concept of "race" to Enlightenment Germany and seek to understand the issues at work in creating a definition of race. The work introduces a significant connection to the history of race theory as contributors show that the language of race was deployed in contexts as apparently unrelated as hygiene; aesthetics; comparative linguistics; anthropology; debates over the status of science, theology, and philosophy; and Jewish emancipation.The concept of race has no single point of origin, and has never operated within the constraints of a single definition. As the essays in this book trace the powerful resonances of the term in diverse contexts, both before and long after the invention of the scientific term around 1775, they help explain how this pseudoconcept could, in a few short decades, have become so powerful in so many fields of thought and practice. In addition, the essays show that the fateful rise of racial thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was made possible not only by the establishment of physical anthropology as a field, but also by other disciplines and agendas linked by the enduring associations of the word "race."

Queerness and Christianity, often depicted as mutually exclusive, both challenge received notions of the good and the natural. Nowhere is this challenge more visible than in the identities, faiths, and communities that queer Christians have long been creating. As Christians they have staked a claim for a Christianity that is true to their self-understandings. How do queer-identified persons understand their religious lives? And in what ways do the lived experiences of queer Christians respond to traditions and reshape them in contemporary practice?Queer Christianities integrates the perspectives of queer theory, religious studies, and Christian theology into a lively conversation—both transgressive and traditional—about the fundamental questions surrounding the lives of queer Christians. The volume contributes to the emerging scholarly discussion on queer religious experiences as lived both within communities of Christian confession, as well as outside of these established communities. Organized around traditional Christian states of life—celibacy, matrimony, and what is here provocatively conceptualized as promiscuity—this work reflects the ways in which queer Christians continually reconstruct and multiply the forms these states of life take.Queer Christianities challenges received ideas about sexuality and religion, yet remains true to Christian self-understandings that are open to further enquiry and to further queerness.