The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications

by Aaron Gross

Through an absorbing investigation into recent, high-profile scandals involving one of the largest kosher slaughterhouses in the world, located unexpectedly in Postville, Iowa, Aaron S. Gross makes a powerful case for elevating the category of the animal in the study of religion. Major theorists have almost without exception approached religion as a phenomenon that radically marks humans off from other animals, but Gross rejects this paradigm, instead matching religion more closely with the life sciences to better theorize human nature.

Gross begins with a detailed account of the scandals at Agriprocessors and their significance for the American and international Jewish community. He argues that without a proper theorization of "animals and religion," we cannot fully understand religiously and ethically motivated diets and how and why the events at Agriprocessors took place. Subsequent chapters recognize the significance of animals to the study of religion in the work of Ernst Cassirer, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Jacques Derrida and the value of indigenous peoples' understanding of animals to the study of religion in our daily lives. Gross concludes by extending the Agribusiness scandal to the activities at slaughterhouses of all kinds, calling attention to the religiosity informing the regulation of "secular" slaughterhouses and its implications for our relationship with and self-imagination through animals.

Genres: Spirituality, Philosophy

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2014

About the author

Aaron Gross is Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at University of San Diego, USA, and CEO of Farm Forward.

Also writes as Aaron S. Gross.

Reviews

[Beth Quick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this work - the questions/topics are challenging and provocative, and I think the way Gross frames some of the challenges of animal studies/animality studies as connected with religion make it a great work to introduce the topic to folks who might be new to the conversations. Recommend.

[Jeffrey Spitz Cohan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor Gross has written a highly important book that is well worth the effort needed to read and comprehend it.

Yes, it does require effort for the lay reader, as this is a book written for academia, in thick academese, with many references to scholars with whom I was wholly unfamiliar.

But Gross, in just 202 pages, has managed to produce a work that is both sweeping in its scope and penetrating in its depth, raising existential questions about what it means to be human amid the global, annual slaughter of 60 billion land animals in food production.

The professor reminds us that we owe our very existence to the compassion and restraint of others – a compassion and restraint that is tragically missing from our relationship with farm animals.

Judaism’s sacred texts place a great deal of emphasis on the human-animal relationship, establishing a moral imperative to treat animals with exquisite sensitivity. Sadly, this area of textual emphasis is “a disavowed centrality” in religious practice, Gross writes.

With this book, Gross has issued a clarion call to restore the compassionate treatment of animals to its proper, central place in Jewish discourse and practice. Given the intensity of the violence and the immensity of the bloodbath in modern animal agriculture, it is more important than ever that Jews hear the call.

[Mavaddat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Densely academic. The author's primary aim is to carefully examine the particulars of the findings of and reactions to an undercover investigation at a Jewish kosher abattoir (slaughterhouse), which he takes as the event, and then to analyze how – as a community of academics – we theorize about human in relation to animal. However, the author is not going to tell you any of that. He just dives into his thinking and describing and analyzing without any explanation of why this event alone should be a defining moment in the dialectic between religion and the animal. The text is thick with references to all manner of theoreticians, but it lacks cohesion. There's no clear thesis or conclusion that the author wants to point out or persuade us of.