Jonathan W. Schofer

Profile

Jonathan Schofer joined the Faculty of Divinity in January 2006, after being on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching center on the nature of the self, ideals for living a good life, and especially how one is to attain those ideals through spiritual exercises, disciplinary practices, and more. Schofer's primary area of research is classical rabbinic literature and thought. His first book, The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics, set the groundwork for the study of rabbinic character ethics, focusing on the transformation of emotion and desire. His second book,Confronting Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics,  continues this line of inquiry with a focus on the ethical significance of mortality and bodily vulnerability. Schofer is also researching the significance of descriptive and comparative ethics for our understandings of reason, subjectivity, tradition, and cosmology. He teaches courses in both rabbinic Judaism and comparative ethics. Materials in his ethics courses include scholarly theories of the self and ethics inspired by Aristotle, Freud, and Foucault, and comparative reflections addressing classical Greece and China, contemporary Indonesia and Central America, and the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.