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Kingdom of Priests

Yesterday, 16 top American Jewish leaders, representing 14 major Jewish organizations, met with Barack Obama in the White House. They had the ear of the president of the United States. From news reports, it seems they chose to talk about pretty much just the narrowest ethnic agenda: Israel, settlements, Iran, and the Mideast. Reactions from…

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? This bears upon our earlier discussion of whether a horribly vile Lovecraftian creature would satisfy God as the ultimate product of an undirected process of evolution as imagined by Darwin. Impoverished island-dwelling family that we are, we can’t afford normal pest-elimination measures. Instead we have a couple…

A final thought on hate and the condition to which traditional religious believers are subjected in this world. Judaism encourages us to look closely at the name of the Torah reading each week, always drawn from a word, sometimes a seeming throwaway, in the opening verse or two of the parshah. In fact, it’s never a…

It sometimes happens that a word outlives its usefulness and has to be put out to pasture along with other terms like “Negro,” for example, or “Oriental.” Or maybe the preferable metaphor would be partial retirement. We can still appropriately use Oriental to refer to a rug but not to a person. I bring this…

Yesterday I wrote about the personal viciousness that issues from the Left in a way it doesn’t from the Right. This actually played a big role in the development of my own thinking, both religious (toward Orthodox Judaism) and political (toward conservatism). When I was a Brown University junior, I was picked to be an…

There are certain things we take for granted about Judaism that turn out not to be so. Like that Jews never proselytized. That they don’t have a mission to the world. And that, for another example, Judaism after the destruction of the Temple was forever after a totally decentralized affair. We never had anything remotely…

Good news: As I know from the weekly reports I get from Beliefnet, traffic on this still relatively new blog keeps going up. That’s heartening. Yet if you follow the comments box at all here you will have noticed something odd: this blog seems disproportionately popular with people who hate me and everything I stand…

Yesterday, groggy from fasting, I read a draft of an essay for a friend. I hope I was helpful in giving some comments to him. I can go relatively easily without the food and maybe the water (from dawn to dark) but not without the coffee. His essay dealt in part with the issue of secondary causes and…

Picture a majestic T. rex receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments in its undersized forelimbs, or an elegant octopus crucified on an old rugged cross with four crossbars instead of one. Such images are what Kenneth Miller presumably has in mind with his comforting Darwinist thought that intelligent creatures were guaranteed to pop up…

Do you ever notice how religious believers are always cited by the media as “devout” precisely when they are equivocating on basic Judeo-Christian moral and theological tenets? Dr. Francis Collins has some startling ideas on abortion. Startling, that is, from an Evangelical Christian who is Obama’s choice to head up the National Institutes of Health. He’s a…
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