Customer Reviews

Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas (Religion and Postmodernism Series)

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Other than the endorsement by Mark C. Taylor, editor of a series on Religion and Postmodernism of which this was the first volume, I can see why this is a first review, some sixteen years after its publication. Reading this book from the perspective of an historian of ideas, and not that of a literary critic, I found it a very difficult read, yet well worth my persistence. As an historian of "ideas," I seek their presuppositions and implications, seeking for culture that which is somewhat akin to the unconscious for the human person, an "un-idea."

As a "roamin'catholic," I appreciate most deeply the author's deconstruction of the false dichotomy between old and new testaments, looking for the day when the Hebrew Bible might speak to us without being encapsulated within the categories of Hellenistic thought forms. The sibling rivalry between Judaism and Christianity continues to have catastrophic consequences for our so-called Western Civilization. What we need is a cathartic deconstruction of the presuppositions of this rivalry, enabling and empowering us to see the otherness of one another, alterity. For, one-anothered into existence from the vast genetic pool of our ancestors, we never cease one-anothering one another into the fullness of our humanity.