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Following Levinas' articulation that "truth is accessible only to the mind capable of experiencing an exile away from its preconceptions and prejudices," Exile and Otherness posits that Shinran, the founder True Pure Land Buddhism, and Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar, exhibit sensitivity to the neglected and suffering others.
List of contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Introducing Shinran and Maimonides
Chapter 2: Shinran and Maimonides: Exile and Tolerance
Chapter 3: Shinran and Maimonides: Exile and the "Other"
Chapter 4: What Can We Learn from the Past
Bibliography
About the Author
About the author
Ilana Maymind, PhD, teaches in the department of religious studies at Chapman University.
Summary
Following Levinas’ articulation that “truth is accessible only to the mind capable of experiencing an exile away from its preconceptions and prejudices,” Exile and Otherness posits that Shinran, the founder True Pure Land Buddhism, and Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar, exhibit sensitivity to the neglected and suffering others.
Additional text
A timely and yet history-rich reflection on the nature of exile and the refugee experience, Maymind’s book is a keenly conducted exercise in drawing insights interculturally about the origins and effortful perfecting of empathy. Engaged through the lenses of Shinran’s and Maimonides’ biographies of exile, the concept of human nature is shown to have an often unsettling depth of relational complexity which Maymind then skillfully weaves into broader reflections on the ethical necessity of exile from familiar patterns of presupposition and prejudice. Exile and Otherness builds a case for embracing strangeness in the pursuit, not simply of greater tolerance for difference, but of achieving ever greater qualities of mutual inclusion.
