Athens, Arden, Jerusalem
Essays in Honor of Mera Flaumenhaft
Contributions by Gisela Berns, Jan H. Blits, Eva Brann, Ronna Burger, Harvey Flaumenhaft, Kate Havard, Leon R. Kass, Margaret Kirby, Pamela Kraus, Paul Ludwig, Wilfred M. McClay, William Mullen, Louis Petrich, Alan Rubenstein, Robert Sacks, Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Adam Schulman, Jeffrey A. Smith, Paul T. Wilford Edited by Paul T. Wilford, Kate Havard
Not available to order
Publication date:
13 October 2017Length of book:
342 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498551434
This collection of essays aims to explore fundamental questions about God, human nature, and political life through careful readings of the Greek poets, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare. The volume investigates the abiding tension between the Hebraic and the Hellenic dimensions of the Western soul through an examination of profound literary, philosophic, and theological reflections on topics as various as friendship, marriage, tyranny, sovereignty, sin, forgiveness, comedy, tragedy, and contemplation. Offered in honor of Mera J. Flaumenhaft, the essays reflect the intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and disciplined imagination of her scholarship and teaching.
The best readers are a curious breed—at once remarkably open, almost naïve in their willingness to take the ordinary, the surface, seriously, and yet remarkably sophisticated in their deep respect for and attention to the difficulty and detail of what they seek to understand. Athens, Arden, Jerusalem honors Mera Flaumenhaft, a paradigmatically good reader, with nineteen essays by others, friends who are good readers in their own rights. The book is a feast of interpretations—of the poetry of Greek antiquity, of the Bible, and especially of Shakespeare as encompassing both Athens and Jerusalem. Like the work of Mera Flaumenhaft herself, these essays are uniformly insightful, intelligent, and, above all, elegantly written.