David Prosnitz Ph.D.

David Prosnitz is an anthropologist by academic training and a businessman by profession. Throughout my 40-year business career, I've thought about religion, particularly Judaism and Christianity, as cultural systems. The phrase religion as a cultural system comes from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz but the way I've thought about religion comes principally from structuralism, whose key person is Levi-Strauss. In truth, however, I've taken an idea from one of my teachers at Chicago, Terrance Turner, and found one key distinction, in this case, spirit and flesh, and found how it is present - even if it is declined in various ways - throughout the religious and kinship system. For example, religion is to kinship as the spirit is to flesh. So is male to female as spirit is to flesh. Once the reader understands that the book is about the underlying structures of religious ideas, much as grammar is about the underlying structure of a sentence, and once the reader sees spirit and flesh as this underlying structure, the book is easy to understand. Fully taking in the idea of structure underlying the religious ideas is the hard part, which is why the book begins with several chapters aimed at introducing the reader to the thinking behind the book. In any case, this is a biography and this is what I've mainly been thinking about as I've grown a business and raised three children with my very supportive wife. The physical character of the book owes much to her thoroughness and its existence owes much to her patience.