Is Natural Law a Border Concept Between Judaism and Christianity?

With the passing of disputations between Jewish and Christian thinkers as to whose tradition has a more universal ethics, the task of Jewish and Christian ethicists is to constitute a universal horizon for their respective bodies of ethics, both of which are essentially particularistic being rooted in special revelation. This parallel project must avoid relativism that is essentially anti‐ethical, and triumphalism that proposes an imperialist ethos. A retrieval of the idea of natural law in each respective tradition enables the constitution of some intelligent common ground for ethical cooperation in both theory and practice between the traditions. This essay also suggests how the constitution of this common ground could include Muslims as well. The constitution of this common ground enables religious ethicists to present more cogent ethical arguments in secular space, but only of course, when those who now control secular space are open to arguments from members of any religious tradition.     

Hagiography and Monotheism in History: Doctrinal encounters between Zoroastrianism,Judaism and Christianity 1

Issues of hagiography and monotheism were central to the historical development of Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity (and subsequently Islam). Overlapping geo graphical locales and cultural heritages, especially during the rule of ancient Iranian dynasties and within Iranian territory, seem to have facilitated and reinforced common solutions that linked devotees across confessional lines through shared communal notions and doctrinal tenets. The hagiographical lives and preachings of Zarathushtra, or Zoroaster, and biblical figures from Moses to Jesus consciously came to parallel each other ex post facto and were regarded as representing different aspects of monotheism. The Zoroastrian dualistic worldview did not exclude monotheism, although it did postulate a separate source of evil. Variations notwith standing, for members of each faith, the spiritual entity venerated by their founder was believed to be God--a condition acknowledged by the other confessional groups as well. Uniting a community of believers around themselves in the veneration of a singular deity eventually transformed Zarathushtra, Moses and Jesus (and later Muhammad) into prophets. Religious founders, the historically created and cross-culturally shaped images of such founders and an intercommunally emergent notion that their words represented communion with the divinity forged and strengthened the shared links between hagiography and monotheism among Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and, in time, Muslims.     

Cultural Meanings of Money in Medieval Ashkenaz: On Gift,Profit, and Value in Medieval Judaism and Christianity

This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, it reassesses a historical narrative describing the emergence of a “new money economy” in the High Middle Ages. In the prevailing narrative, money is positioned as a causal agent: it is said to effect and symbolize the “profit motive,” becoming a locus for anxiety about the new money economy. But a close reading of moral literature suggests that money per se was not a locus of anxiety. Moralists had a sophisticated understanding of economic value and its relation to moral economy. Anxiety among Jewish and Christian moralists focused on the possible disjuncture between moral and economic values, not on economic value per se. Through close readings of medieval exempla, this article demonstrates that moralists regarded the economic act of acquisition as creating a moral value. When “bad” moral value adhered to coins, they sought to devise means for redeeming that value through penitential acts. This ideology, which was shared by Jewish and Christian authors, suggests that cultural assumptions about money were more sophisticated than a straightforward fear of the profit economy and profit motive and that the narrative of European economic development as a shift from gift economy to profit economy ought to be problematized. Binary oppositions between gift and profit and between an altruistic Christianity (linked to a gift economy) and a modernizing Judaism (linked to a profit economy) ought to be broken down.