R.R. Reno on "Faith in the Flesh"
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2017
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sometimes, it takes an outsider to teach a community about its own deepest truths and most powerful teachings. In "Faith in the Flesh," one of America's most insightful Catholic thinkers does just that for faithful Jews. In this breathtaking piece, published in Commentary a decade ago, R.R. Reno offers a profound meditation on the meaning of Jewish ritual, education, and distinctiveness. Framed by a scene of his daughter chanting the Ten Commandments on the day of her bat mitzvah, the essay tells the story of Reno's Jewish family and the impact it had on his own Christian faith.
In this podcast, Reno speaks with Tikvah Fund Senior Director Jonathan Silver about his essay. Reno recounts how he came to raise his children as Jews while remaining committed to, and even deepening, his Christian faith. He and Silver go on to cover the contrasting ways Judaism and Christianity seek to inspire moral behavior as well as the tradeoffs of each approach. They touch on the political and social implications of each faith's teachings and conclude by discussing the lessons both Jews and Christians ought to take away from Reno's experience with the blows of intermarriage.
Courtesy of Pro Musica Hebraica, musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim, and performed by the ARC Ensemble
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tikva podcast and Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. |
| 0:13.0 | If you like listening to our podcast, I invite you to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher, |
| 0:18.0 | and I hope you'll also leave us a rating and a review. If you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, |
| 0:24.6 | tikfafund.org, follow us on Twitter at TikvaFund, or like us on Facebook. |
| 0:30.6 | My guest today is R.R. Reno, one of America's most penetrating Catholic intellectuals, |
| 0:35.6 | known to his friends as Rusty. |
| 0:38.3 | He's a theology professor, author of many essays and articles, a very fine commentary in the |
| 0:43.3 | book of Genesis, and since 2011, he's been the editor of First Things. |
| 0:49.3 | In August 2016, Rusty published his most recent book, Resurrecting the idea of a Christian society. |
| 0:56.2 | We're here today to talk about an essay that Rusty wrote for Commentary magazine. It's published |
| 1:01.1 | almost a decade ago. Faith in the flesh tells the story of Rusty's Jewish wife and children |
| 1:07.0 | from the perspective of his own deepening commitment to his Christian faith and his |
| 1:11.3 | Catholic calling. It's a breathtaking essay, among the most moving theological reflections |
| 1:17.6 | on Jewish education, Jewish distinctiveness that I've ever read, and that it was written |
| 1:23.2 | by a theologically attuned Christian should not surprise us. There's a real power in someone |
| 1:27.8 | raised outside of Jewish traditions, seeing them up close for the first time. It struck me, |
| 1:33.6 | Rusty, in your son and your daughter, you are able to see and describe elements of the Jewish |
| 1:38.5 | way of life that are sometimes a little less apparent to Jews who are fully immersed in traditions |
| 1:43.7 | from birth. |
| 1:45.8 | In our conversation today, I'd like to explore that and also to hear how this exposure |
| 1:49.6 | to traditional Judaism provoked in you a kind of, well, not a crisis, but a struggle and ultimately |
... |
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