UNCOMMON FRIENDSHIPS

Uncommon Friendships explores the often-overlooked dynamic of interreligious friendships, considering their significance for how we think about contemporary religious thought. By exploring the dynamics of three relationships between important religious thinkers--Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, and Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement--this study demonstrates the ways such friendships enable innovation and transformation within religious traditions. For each pair of thinkers, the sustained engagement and disagreement between them becomes central to their religious and philosophical development, helping them to respond effectively and creatively to issues and problems facing their communities and societies. Through a rereading of their work, Young shows how such friendships can help us rethink religion, aesthetics, education, and politics--as well as friendship itself. An utterly remarkable treatise on the inter-religious friendships that joined three pairs of the great thinkers of twentieth-century Europe. I know of nothing quite like this. It is rigorous scholarship that has the sharp edge of cultural criticism and yet the inspiring effect of a philosophic and spiritual poem. Its lesson is indeed uncommon