“The human being embodies a tension between a nature which has since been lost and an unreachable Divine Creator,” writes Rudolf Borchardt in his book The Passionate Gardener. And he continues: “The garden stands at precisely the center of this tension and displaces itself, in accord with its fluctuations in the epoch and the individual, toward one or the other: toward nature or creativity. This is the deepest reason for which the human being dreams that our origins lie in a (...) garden, and that the garden is the place in which we achieve enlightenment; this is why we hope to find redemption in a garden, and why we look for solace there.”2What Borchardt articulates so well is that a garden is not just an enactment of a.. (shrink)

Eleven essays on the life and thought of the Jewish philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig.

Scholarly and well-balanced; it breathes a conviction that, underlying the initial divergencies in the Jewish philosophical and theological tradition, there is a unity in the direction of inquiry and content that is not merely man-made. The richness of the Jewish philosophical tradition could hardly have been more adequately presented in one volume. The only complaint is that sufficient mention is not made of the Jewish philosophers and philosophies of the Kabbala, possibly because of the author's conviction that such was not (...) truly philosophy and only dubiously religion.—E. A. R. (shrink)