Between Maimonides and Aquinas

How a Jewish Rabbi and a Christian Friar Still Shape Our Talk About God

By: James Hibbs Farris

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

What if the way you pray, doubt, and argue about God was mapped out eight hundred years ago—by two men who never met and couldn’t read each other’s language?

This book tells the story of Moses Maimonides, the Jewish physician‑rabbi in medieval Cairo, and Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican friar in medieval Paris, and shows how their running argument still decides what many of us dare to say about God. Drawing on their major works—the Guide for the Perplexed, the Mishneh Torah, and the Summa Theologiae—and using AI‑assisted reading to trace patterns across thousands of pages, the author puts them into a real conversation neither man lived to have. The result is a clear, accessible tour through their shared ground and sharp disagreements on divine simplicity, God’s emotions, providence, prayer, law, and the Incarnation.

You’ll see why both thinkers insist that God is not “a being in the sky,” why Maimonides pushes language toward reverent silence while Aquinas defends carefully stretched analogies, and how those choices ripple out into questions like: Does prayer change anything? Is God really personal? Can one path be uniquely saving without injustice to others? Along the way, the book cuts through stereotypes—Maimonides as cold rationalist, Aquinas as naive believer—to show two rigorous, devout minds protecting the mystery of God from both sentimentality and cynicism.
Written for thoughtful readers rather than specialists, Between Maimonides and Aquinas offers:

• A gripping narrative of how a Jewish and a Christian thinker came to share a philosophical vocabulary
• Clear explanations of complex ideas like divine simplicity, negative theology, and analogy
• “Third‑move” insights that map where their arguments truly clash and where inherited polemics exaggerate the distance
• Concrete connections to live questions about God’s love, suffering, justice, and the future of faith

Whether you come as a believer, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, this book will change how you hear today’s debates about whether God is personal, how prayer “works,” and what we are really saying when we say “God is good.” It invites you not just to watch the conversation between Maimonides and Aquinas, but to recognize that you are already inside it—and to decide, more consciously, how you will speak of God from here.