Melissa Raphael
Biographic Data
| ID | 324260 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Melissa Raphael |
| GIVEN NAMES | Melissa |
| FAMILY NAME | Raphael |
| SIGNATURE | RAPHAEL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Gloucestershire |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Loving the Planet as a Stranger: A Contemporary Jewish Summons to Environmental Activism
This article proposes a Jewish ecotheological expansion of the commandment to love the stranger to include the plants and animals of the non-human biosphere. While Emmanuel Levinas did not address the problem of environmental degradation, his relational ethic is used here to suggest that Jews respond to the appeal of the anthropogenically ravaged face of the Earth, and that of the non-human environmental refugees that move across it, with a love …
Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm: Being and Becoming in the Women’s Liberation Movement
Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm identifies religious and secular feminism’s common critical moment as that of idol-breaking. It reads the women’s liberation movement as founded upon a philosophically and emotionally risky attempt to liberate women’s consciousness from a three-fold cognitive captivity to the self-idolizing god called ‘Man’; the ‘God’ who is a projection of his power, and the idol of the feminine called ‘Woman’ that the god-call…
Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm: Being and Becoming in the Women's Liberation Movement
From broken idols, a Goddess feminist self
Roundtable Review of Stephen Pattison’s Saving Face
Book Review of Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology. By Stephen Pattison. 202 +viii pp. Farnham: Ashgate. 2013. (Abingdon: Routledge. 2016). £34.99 (PBK) ISBN: 978-1-4094-3692-8 Reviewed by: Stephen Roberts, Modern Theology, University of Chichester, Chichester, UK
The creation of beauty by its destruction: The idoloclastic aesthetic in modern and contemporary Jewish art
Contemporary commentators are well aware that the Jewish tradition is not an aniconic one. Far from suppressing art, the Second Commandment produces it. And not just abstract art; it also uses halakhically mandated idoloclastic techniques to produce figurative images that at once cancel and restore the glory (kavod) of the human. This article suggests that Jewish art's observance of the Second Commandment's proscription of idolatrous images (a co…
Idolatry and Fixation: Modern Jewish Thought and the Criticism of Cosmetically and Technologically Perfected Female Faces in Contemporary Popular Culture
This article argues that the ‘halakhically’ (legally) governed representational techniques employed by Jewish art are founded upon a counter-idolatrous theology of appearance: both human and divine. In drawing upon a range of Jewish sources from the ancient to the contemporary period that understand idolatry as an estrangement of the world from God, this article presents a Jewish feminist theological critique of alienation in the late modern popu…
From Historiography to Theography: Reflections on the Role of Theological Aesthetics in The Female Face of God in Auschwitz
This article gives the author’s response to the four preceding essays. It reflects on how, six years after its publication, the book’s contribution might be categorised not only as a work of Jewish feminist theology, but also as a form of Jewish aesthetic theology. That is, without furthering a cultural aestheticisation of the Holocaust whose romanticism threatens to sever the events from their own historicity, the book should be read as a theolo…
The Mystery of the Slashed Nose and the Empty Box: Towards a theology of Jewish art
Supported by cultural and historical studies of Jewish art, this article challenges twentieth‐century Jewish religious thought’s resistance to the visual image by construing Jewish art as a revelatory process carried within the patterning of Jewish diasporic movement across time and space. This movement produces a spectacle that thereby defines Jewish art not as the production of ceremonial or cultural artefacts, nor as anti‐images of absence and…
The Kiss of the Shekhinah: Narratives of Human and Divine Motherhood in the Holocaust
During the Holocaus Jewish mothers and their children were treated by the Nazis not as non-combatants but as enemies posing a direct racial threat to the Reich. This paper will use the recent research into gender and the Holocaust and oral histories of mothers and daughters who survived the Holocaust to show how woment experienced and resisted that status as "enemies" of the Reich. And more to the theological point, this paper will explore how th…
The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust
This is the first full-length feminist dialogue with Holocaust theory, theology and social history. It builds on the published memoirs of four women held at Auschwitz
The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish feminist theology of the Holocaust
The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschw…
When God Beheld God: Notes Towards a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust
Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism, and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities
This paper argues that Jewish Goddess feminism illustrates the complexity of alternative religious identities and their fluid, ambiguous, and sometimes intimate historical, cultural, and religious connections to mainstream religious identities.1 While Jewish Goddess feminists find contemporary Judaism theologically and politically problematic, thealogy (feminist discourse on the Goddess and the divinity of femaleness) can offer them precisely the…
Thealogy, Redemption and the Call of the Wild
J. Ellice Hopkins: The Construction of a Recent Spiritual Feminist Foremother
This article retrieves the contribution of a nineteenth-century proto-feminist activist for the history of the womanspirit movement. But that is not its primary purpose. Above all, the article asks a methodological question: namely, how post-Christian spiritual feminists might claim recent foremothers when most women of spirit have, until the early 1970s, been inspired by Christian patriarchal theology. I argue that Hopkins's direct action can be…
Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion
Goddess feminism is a new emancipatory religion which appears to typify postmodern religion, but which, using Anthony Giddens' social theory, I prefer to understand as having a peculiarly late modern reflexive character. And it is, I suggest, Goddess religion's reflexivity that imposes immense strains on its capacity to be or become the world-altering religion most of its adherents would want it to be. This religion is founded within a modern pol…
Feminism, Constructivism and Numinous Experience
This article brings together constructivist epistemology and feminist study of religion to provide phenomenological evidence that numinous consciousness is not the immediate, sui generis essence of religious experience that Rudolf Otto believed it to be. Whilst there are certain peculiarities in the Ottonian scheme that might make numinous consciousness unusually resistant to conceptual and ideological mediation, it can be shown that androcentric…
At the East End of Eden: A Feminist Spirituality of Gardening: Our Way Past the Flaming Sword
Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion
Goddess feminism is a new emancipatory religion which appears to typify postmodern religion, but which, using Anthony Giddens' social theory, I prefer to understand as having a peculiarly late modern reflexive character. And it is, I suggest, Goddess religion's reflexivity that imposes immense strains on its capacity to be or become the world-altering religion most of its adherents would want it to be. This religion is founded within a modern pol…
The creation of beauty by its destruction: The idoloclastic aesthetic in modern and contemporary Jewish art
Contemporary commentators are well aware that the Jewish tradition is not an aniconic one. Far from suppressing art, the Second Commandment produces it. And not just abstract art; it also uses halakhically mandated idoloclastic techniques to produce figurative images that at once cancel and restore the glory (kavod) of the human. This article suggests that Jewish art's observance of the Second Commandment's proscription of idolatrous images (a co…
At the East End of Eden: A Feminist Spirituality of Gardening: Our Way Past the Flaming Sword
Feminism, Constructivism and Numinous Experience
This article brings together constructivist epistemology and feminist study of religion to provide phenomenological evidence that numinous consciousness is not the immediate, sui generis essence of religious experience that Rudolf Otto believed it to be. Whilst there are certain peculiarities in the Ottonian scheme that might make numinous consciousness unusually resistant to conceptual and ideological mediation, it can be shown that androcentric…
J. Ellice Hopkins: The Construction of a Recent Spiritual Feminist Foremother
This article retrieves the contribution of a nineteenth-century proto-feminist activist for the history of the womanspirit movement. But that is not its primary purpose. Above all, the article asks a methodological question: namely, how post-Christian spiritual feminists might claim recent foremothers when most women of spirit have, until the early 1970s, been inspired by Christian patriarchal theology. I argue that Hopkins's direct action can be…
Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion
Goddess feminism is a new emancipatory religion which appears to typify postmodern religion, but which, using Anthony Giddens' social theory, I prefer to understand as having a peculiarly late modern reflexive character. And it is, I suggest, Goddess religion's reflexivity that imposes immense strains on its capacity to be or become the world-altering religion most of its adherents would want it to be. This religion is founded within a modern pol…
Thealogy, Redemption and the Call of the Wild
Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism, and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities
This paper argues that Jewish Goddess feminism illustrates the complexity of alternative religious identities and their fluid, ambiguous, and sometimes intimate historical, cultural, and religious connections to mainstream religious identities.1 While Jewish Goddess feminists find contemporary Judaism theologically and politically problematic, thealogy (feminist discourse on the Goddess and the divinity of femaleness) can offer them precisely the…
When God Beheld God: Notes Towards a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust
The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust
This is the first full-length feminist dialogue with Holocaust theory, theology and social history. It builds on the published memoirs of four women held at Auschwitz
The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish feminist theology of the Holocaust
The dominant theme of post-Holocaust Jewish theology has been that of the temporary hiddenness of God, interpreted either as a divine mystery or, more commonly, as God's deferral to human freedom. But traditional Judaic obligations of female presence, together with the traditional image of the Shekhinah as a figure of God's 'femaleness' accompanying Israel into exile, seem to contradict such theologies of absence. The Female Face of God in Auschw…
The Mystery of the Slashed Nose and the Empty Box: Towards a theology of Jewish art
Supported by cultural and historical studies of Jewish art, this article challenges twentieth‐century Jewish religious thought’s resistance to the visual image by construing Jewish art as a revelatory process carried within the patterning of Jewish diasporic movement across time and space. This movement produces a spectacle that thereby defines Jewish art not as the production of ceremonial or cultural artefacts, nor as anti‐images of absence and…
The Kiss of the Shekhinah: Narratives of Human and Divine Motherhood in the Holocaust
During the Holocaus Jewish mothers and their children were treated by the Nazis not as non-combatants but as enemies posing a direct racial threat to the Reich. This paper will use the recent research into gender and the Holocaust and oral histories of mothers and daughters who survived the Holocaust to show how woment experienced and resisted that status as "enemies" of the Reich. And more to the theological point, this paper will explore how th…
From Historiography to Theography: Reflections on the Role of Theological Aesthetics in The Female Face of God in Auschwitz
This article gives the author’s response to the four preceding essays. It reflects on how, six years after its publication, the book’s contribution might be categorised not only as a work of Jewish feminist theology, but also as a form of Jewish aesthetic theology. That is, without furthering a cultural aestheticisation of the Holocaust whose romanticism threatens to sever the events from their own historicity, the book should be read as a theolo…
Idolatry and Fixation: Modern Jewish Thought and the Criticism of Cosmetically and Technologically Perfected Female Faces in Contemporary Popular Culture
This article argues that the ‘halakhically’ (legally) governed representational techniques employed by Jewish art are founded upon a counter-idolatrous theology of appearance: both human and divine. In drawing upon a range of Jewish sources from the ancient to the contemporary period that understand idolatry as an estrangement of the world from God, this article presents a Jewish feminist theological critique of alienation in the late modern popu…
The creation of beauty by its destruction: The idoloclastic aesthetic in modern and contemporary Jewish art
Contemporary commentators are well aware that the Jewish tradition is not an aniconic one. Far from suppressing art, the Second Commandment produces it. And not just abstract art; it also uses halakhically mandated idoloclastic techniques to produce figurative images that at once cancel and restore the glory (kavod) of the human. This article suggests that Jewish art's observance of the Second Commandment's proscription of idolatrous images (a co…
Roundtable Review of Stephen Pattison’s Saving Face
Book Review of Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology. By Stephen Pattison. 202 +viii pp. Farnham: Ashgate. 2013. (Abingdon: Routledge. 2016). £34.99 (PBK) ISBN: 978-1-4094-3692-8 Reviewed by: Stephen Roberts, Modern Theology, University of Chichester, Chichester, UK
Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm: Being and Becoming in the Women’s Liberation Movement
Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm identifies religious and secular feminism’s common critical moment as that of idol-breaking. It reads the women’s liberation movement as founded upon a philosophically and emotionally risky attempt to liberate women’s consciousness from a three-fold cognitive captivity to the self-idolizing god called ‘Man’; the ‘God’ who is a projection of his power, and the idol of the feminine called ‘Woman’ that the god-call…
Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm: Being and Becoming in the Women's Liberation Movement
From broken idols, a Goddess feminist self
Loving the Planet as a Stranger: A Contemporary Jewish Summons to Environmental Activism
This article proposes a Jewish ecotheological expansion of the commandment to love the stranger to include the plants and animals of the non-human biosphere. While Emmanuel Levinas did not address the problem of environmental degradation, his relational ethic is used here to suggest that Jews respond to the appeal of the anthropogenically ravaged face of the Earth, and that of the non-human environmental refugees that move across it, with a love …
Sociology (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (10 works) · Theology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Judaism (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Religious studies (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)