Learning at the Library » monotheism http://gottesman.pressible.org Research tips, event recaps, how-to's and best kept secrets from TC's Gottesman Libraries. Fri, 24 May 2013 19:21:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 The Price of Monotheism http://gottesman.pressible.org/ath/the-price-of-monotheism http://gottesman.pressible.org/ath/the-price-of-monotheism#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:40:26 +0000 alex http://gottesman.pressible.org/?p=13120 Title: The Price of Monotheism

Author: Jan Assmann, trans. Robert Savage

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2009

Call Number: EBOOKS

From the Publisher:

Nothing has so radically transformed the world as the distinction between true and false religion. In this nuanced consideration of his own controversial Moses the Egyptian, renowned Egyptologist Jan Assmann answers his critics, extending and building upon ideas from his previous book. Maintaining that it was indeed the Moses of the Hebrew Bible who introduced the true-false distinction in a permanent and revolutionary form, Assmann reiterates that the price of this monotheistic revolution has been the exclusion, as paganism and heresy, of everything deemed incompatible with the truth it proclaims. This exclusion has exploded time and again into violence and persecution, with no end in sight. Here, for the first time, Assmann traces the repeated attempts that have been made to do away with this distinction since the early modern period. He explores at length the notions of primary versus secondary religions, of “counter-religions,” and of book religions versus cultic religions. He also deals with the entry of ethics into religion’s very core. Informed by the debate his own work has generated, he presents a compelling lesson in the fluidity of cultural identity and beliefs.

About the Author:

Jan Assmann is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. A prize-winning scholar, he has published extensively on religious history and ancient Egypt. Stanford published his Religion and Cultural Memory in 2006.

On the Web:

Stanford University Press

Assmann’s Religion and Cultural Memory

Author’s Faculty Page at University of Heidelberg

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