Reviews for The Evolution of Morality and Religion: A Biological Perspective

The average rating for The Evolution of Morality and Religion: A Biological Perspective based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-26 00:00:00 Marion Williams Lessons learned: Not only is it hard to skim essays by Judith Butler and actually understand them, it's also hard to skim essays about Judith Butler and actually understand them. I think the most helpful thing I got from my (too rapidly skimmed--it's not you, it's me!) interaction with this book was the Butlerian fragment "gender produces sex" (vs. sex producing gender), which made sense to me in a way that illuminated Butler's theory of gender performativity a little more for me. I think.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-10-22 00:00:00 Patrick Henry I did not read the whole book! I got this in order to read an essay by Saba Mahmood about Egyptian women choosing to veil. It was a new take on this phenomenon: Mahmood discussed how women's religious studies classes think about modesty as a quality of character that helps a person develop submissiveness. (These terms have religious connotations with which I'm not 100% familiar. I think it's related to humility, but I'm going to try to be humble about asserting that I know more than I do!) What does this have to do with Judith Butler? Mahmood attempts to establish the idea that performance is gender, and how this fits in with women's decisions about how to engage with their physicality. (Through veiling, in this case.) I read a few more articles from the anthology: one about the woman who anoints Jesus' feet in the Gospel of Luke, one on women and ordination in Catholicism, the introduction, and Butler's own article. Butler's afterword established her connection to Judaism and to my childhood congregation in Cleveland and the rabbi there, a religion professor at Case Western Reserve University who specialized in Maimonides. He helped Butler satisfy her curiosity about philosophical topics--at 13 she wanted to know more about Spinoza. I do not understand Butler's thought most of the time, and it didn't help me that most of these articles were first, working off of her later books and second, about religions with which I'm not engaged enough. Mahmood's piece was very interesting for me though. I might take this one out of the library again just to attempt to reread Butler's afterword and take another stab at it.