The Question of the Animal and Religion

Reviews / Votes

With this highly original and exciting book, Aaron S. Gross stands at the cutting edge of a radical reconsideration of the nature of religiosity and theological reflection. Beautifully written, this book has to be read by anyone with an interest in the study of religion. -- Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College Starting from the scandal evoked by the revelation of grossly cruel practices in kosher slaughterhouses in the United States, and the subsequent defense of these practices by leading figures in Orthodox Jewry, Aaron S. Gross proceeds to a wide-ranging exploration of the justification of slaughter in Abrahamic religion and into our willed blindness to the animal as a religious subject. His philosophical and theological inquiries are driven by well-justified ethical concern at what factory farming, buttressed by so-called animal science, tells about the age we live in. -- J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A leading young scholar in the emerging field of animal studies, Gross reveals the deep binaries around which most dominant religious worldviews, as well as the Enlightenment-vectored study of religion, have always revolved-human/animal, subject/object, culture/nature, self/other. Without a radical surrender of these divisions, which render animals as but 'a foil and shadow of the human world,' no legitimate theorizing about religion can take place. Nor is any true religious life possible. Echoing two heartbreaking cries to heaven, separated by eighteen hundred years-the plea of a calf seeking refuge from kosher slaughter in the robes of Rabbi Judah the Prince and the screams of cattle half-butchered but still alive in the now-infamous 'kosher' meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa-this work makes its own unforgettable plea. Do we have the courage to sacrifice sacrifice itself? There will be no getting around this book. -- Kimberley C. Patton, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University The Question of the Animal and Religion makes a significant contribution to both the larger field of animal studies and the smaller subdiscipline of animal studies in religion. This is in part because Aaron S. Gross's case study on the brutal and systematic animal cruelty at a kosher-meat-producing company is so important, and especially because Gross's is the first work in animal studies in religion to present such a thorough methodological approach. -- Barbara K. Darling, Wheaton College The Question of the Animal and Religion makes a crucial contribution to the emerging field of animals and religion. As of today, I cannot name another study that has specifically analyzed the thinking of the foundational theorists of religious studies such as Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, and J.Z. Smith in regard to animals. -- Barbara Rossetti Ambros, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Question of the Animal and Religion persuasively demonstrates the need to extend our understanding of religion beyond the human drama to include, as Gross insists, the drama of living itself. This book deserves to be taken seriously. Reading Religion Gross's book marks a welcome and important step in bringing animal studies to the study of religion, and religion to animal studies. -- Katharine Mershon Journal of Religion