CFP: "Tikvah Journal for Jewish Thought" on religion and reason

Call for papers for the "Tikvah Journal for Jewish Thought", the new graduate online journal of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.

Proposals on (Jewish) political theology are explicitly welcome.

The first issue of the "Tikvah Journal for Jewish Thought" invites explorations on the theme: "Religion and Reason". Historically, the process of secularization brought about a debate among philosophers, politicians, and theologians concerning the role of religion in the public sphere and distinguishing secular reason from religious conviction. Yet questions pertaining to the nature of the relation between religion and reason are as old as theology and philosophy. The editors welcome papers addressing such questions, spanning the ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern eras, and drawing from a broad range of disciplinary fields.

Suggested topics include: the crisis of the Enlightenment: skepticism and naturalism; the "end" of metaphysics; faith, rational justification, and common sense; divine attributes and allegorical thought; translation: biblical terms and philosophical concepts or categories; the role of religion in the public sphere; the nature of justification in religious and secular laws; religious calendars and political bonds; political theology; modern alienation

Suggested interlocutors include: Aristotle; Philo of Alexandria; Plotinus; Al-Farabi; Al-Ghazali; Maimonides; Shmuel Ibn Tibbon; Hasdai Crescas; Abarbanel; Descartes; Spinoza; Leibniz; Kant; Fichte; Schelling; Hegel; Kierkegaard; Hermann Cohen; Martin Buber; Franz Rosenzweig; Walter Benjamin; Hans-Georg Gadamer; Emmanuel Lévinas; Paul Ricoeur

Submission details: Please send an abstract no longer than 500 words and prepared for "blind-review" (with the author's name and institutional affiliation appearing on a separate page) to the following e-mail address: tikvahjournal@gmail.com

Deadline: 15 November 2009

If accepted, you will be asked to submit a paper ranging in length between 5,000 and 7,000 words by 15 January 2010. Accepted papers will appear in Vol. 1 of the "Tikvah Journal for Jewish Thought" late in the spring of 2010.