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[personal profile] seekingferret
Maimonides: A Guide for Today's Perplexed by Kenneth Seeskin

A fairly short, academic but Jewishly-guided synopsis of the arguments in Maimonides's Moreh Nevuchin, the 'Guide for the Perplexed'. Can't remember where I got this rec, probably from [personal profile] rhu, but though this was incredibly slow going and very apt to prompt me to get very sleepy and want to take a nap, (probably helped by the fact that I mostly read this on lazy Shabbat afternoons) I really enjoyed reading it and appreciated the insight into the Rambam's philosophy and its strengths and limitations. Seeskin provides a very strong argument for his interpretation of Rambam's envisionment of the radical unity of God and what that means for the viable methods for knowing God. And I particularly appreciated how Seeskin sees Rambam's conclusion as not representing a fully realized philosophical system, but as a call to constantly seek to perfect one's knowledge of God in the world- a call that is not merely theoretical and abstract but is incredibly concrete as embodied by performance of mitzvot. As I was reading Seeskin, I have also been studying bits and pieces of Mishneh Torah, and it actually does feel like Mishneh Torah and Moreh Nevuchin represent sort of dual keys to each other. Mishneh Torah on its own is a little unsatisfying to study, compared to Talmud, because it occupies a middle ground. It's not Shulchan Aruch, laying out a codification of the laws without citing the derivations: This is what we practice. But it's not Talmud, working out the laws in detail: this is where the laws come from. But Mishneh Torah as a deliberate cipher designed as a guide to perfecting one's knowledge of God through the practice of mitzvot makes sense, and its existence thus provides a guide to living out the life suggested in Moreh Nevuchin.


G is for Gumshoe by Sue Grafton

Not my favorite in the series, because the interlocking mysteries were messy and disjoint and then resolved in a disturbingly neat way, but I enjoyed it enough to keep going. The first time in the series, though, that I felt like the idea of reading 20 of these is daunting, because it was for the first time a little bit of a chore to read.


Currently finishing up NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season, midway through a reread of Gerald Schroeder's The Science of God, and starting George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-06-28 02:04 am (UTC)
batdina: (books cats)
From: [personal profile] batdina
I will look forward to talking about Daniel Deronda with you when you're further into the novel. Once upon a time I fancied myself a Victorianist (then I read Shakespeare's Sonnets and there went that idea) so I read my way through Eliot and have mostly settled on Daniel Deronda as the most interesting, if not the best of the lot.

I am now off top poke Schroeder and see if it does what I'm hoping from the title.

(no subject)

Date: 2016-06-28 02:33 am (UTC)
batdina: steve rogers with his finger on his lips (it's a secret)
From: [personal profile] batdina
Yes. I glanced at the great database, saw that he had written the big bang book, and realized I knew what the book would be. S'okay. When I used that book last, it was teaching Genesis to a group of ninth graders. It fits there pretty well.

I can never be 15 again either, and that's perfectly okay with me. Then again, some things *were* simpler then: faith, for instance, among other things.

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