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Old Obfuscations and New Conversations
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Journal Article
Old Obfuscations and New Conversations
2022
Overview
[...]possible conversations were made especially poignant in recent years by the confluence ofseveral factors, including the decidedly theological frame ofsome of Roth's late novels, Roth's own ritual-less funeral, the publication of Blake Bailey's salacious biography, and our general, almost childlike dismay at what seems to us to be the growing inability of contemporary literary scholarship to take religion and theology seriously. [...]our motivation for this Special Issue is bringing together religiously literate and religiously insightful scholars to think and write about one of our favorite subjects, Philip Roth. In the second essay in his book In Bluebeard's Castle (1971), George Steiner notes that Jews are unique-and therefore often despised-not actually for their ethnic self-isolation (the same observation could be made concerning many of the world's peoples) but because they are the bearers ofJudaism, a totally unique, world historical, world altering set of values, predicated on a form of ethical monotheism that invented and then universally imposed (through argument rather than arms-another deeply annoying quality) a set ofmoral responsibilities, laws, and obligations upon all the nations ofthe earth. Steiner notes (the final quote is Nietzsche's), \"In polytheism [. . .] lay the freedom of the human spirit, its creative multiplicity. The doctrine ofa single Deity, whom men cannot play offagainst other gods and thus win open spaces for their own aims, is 'the most monstrous of all human errors'\" (38).
