To Heal a Fractured World

The Ethics of Responsibility

By Jonathan Sacks
Series: McGill-Queen’s Studies in the Hist of Re
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Hardcover : 9780773530324, 288 pages, December 2005

Description

One of Judaism's most distinctive and challenging ideas is its ethics of responsibility. We have been given the gift of freedom and we in turn have to honour and enhance the freedom of others. However, more than in any previous generation, we have come to see the individual as the sole source of meaning. In To Heal a Fractured World Jonathan Sacks argues that this is a mistake for ethics are concerned with the life we live together and the goods we share only exist by virtue of being shared. Sacks's argument demonstrates a profound engagement with the human condition today. Drawing from a vast and diverse intellectual tradition Sacks speaks with as much authority about the Hebrew Bible as he does about Maimonides, Sigmund Freud, or Hannah Arendt.

Reviews

?A book for our time. Sacks writes with a quiet passion that is accessible to religionist and secularist alike... a desperately needed transfusion of hope.' The Catholic Herald