New Book Release: Jewish Law: New Perspectives

Jewish Law: New Perspectives by Suzanne Last Stone and Yonatan Y. Brafman, eds.

New Perspectives on Jewish Law combines the detailed work characteristic of scholarship on Jewish law with an orientation towards its broader academic and cultural significance. It shifts the study of Jewish law from its focus on legal doctrine and history to legal theory, achieving in the process a more sophisticated understanding of law that will benefit both the legal academy and Jewish studies. By employing the framework of legal theory, it similarly corrects an over-emphasis on the metaphysical presuppositions and philosophical implications of Jewish law, which has tended to cast it as exceptional relative to other legal systems. Moreover, it answers to old-new anxieties about law, often symbolized by Judaism, raised by contemporary feminists and by philosophers who are animated by recent interpretations of Paul through actual engagement with the Jewish legal tradition.

The volume consists of three parts. The first focuses on the critique of positivism, its implications, and the new directions that it opens up for the analysis of Jewish law. The second part takes stock of recent methodological developments in the study of Jewish legal texts and investigates the relation between Jewish law and the disciplines, including history, literary theory, ritual studies, the digital humanities, as well as traditional approaches to Jewish learning. It concludes with a reflection on these interdisciplinary contributions from the perspective of legal theory. The third part explores the connections among Jewish law, philosophy, and culture critique. It assesses the relation or lack thereof between Jewish law and modern Jewish thought, and examines specific issues of philosophical interest, including truth and normativity. It also investigates the image of Jewish law in the contemporary critique of law as well as how Jewish law could productively contribute to that debate. It concludes with a reflection on these studies from the perspective of philosophy of law.

New Book Release: Know Your Soul

Know Your Soul: Journeying with the Enneagram by Joseph Howell

Joseph Howell suffered from excruciating grief over his son's illness and death in 2008. A clinical psychologist and spiritual teacher, Howell's pain forced him to search his spirituality. An immersion into the ancient wisdom of the Enneagram revealed a pearl of vastly more profound knowledge than personality types. It was an Enneagram of nine soul types and their particular soul qualities. This discovery of the Enneagram of soul beautifully reconnected Howell to aspects of his soul that he was unaware existed. These soul qualities helped heal his overwhelming grief when little else could. This transformative experience led to this groundbreaking work. Years in preparation, this book is unique among those on spirituality and the Enneagram. Besides presenting Enneagram teachings, Howell tells intimate personal stories of how to recognize our soul type's unique qualities, and how the dominant ego becomes transforms into a servant of our soul. During the writing of this book, Howell and his wife, Lark, lost their only other child, Lauren. The Enneagram of soul is a map of truth that sustains their faith and their commitment to this work, even in this second great loss. People searching for deeper meaning and those who have experienced significant grief of any kind will want to read this book. Beginners and advanced students of the Enneagram will also benefit from it because it takes them from Enneagram basics to finer concepts of soul work.