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Kingdom of Priests

To conservatives who this morning are decrying Obama’s Cairo speech for making nice with Islam, I would ask, realistically, what would you have had him say? Should he have condemned Islam, really raked it over the coals, as some conservative bloggers never tire of doing? If you had been asked to write the speech, please…

When I got home from work last night, our 7-year-old rushed up to me. He’s currently obsessed with Pokemon cards — which I had thought went out of business long ago but evidently I was wrong. He breathlessly explained, “Dad, I got a Raichu card today! Pikachu evolved into Raichu!” Pokemon evolutionary theory? I had…

That’s the simple lesson from the Rabbi Manis Friedman affair, which, if you haven’t looked into it, you’re probably better off. What on earth was he thinking? It will blow over quickly, but what a bad day for Chabad. And what a strange day when I find myself agreeing with the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman.…

The purpose of this blog is to tease out the worldview of the Hebrew Bible, with implications for everything from politics to family life to the history of life’s development on earth. Much of liberalism can be explained as a counter-force to that worldview. There’s an element of the same dynamic at work too in…

A reader of yesterday’s entry on the first anti-Darwinists challenges me, in effect, to explain why if secularism is so deleterious to social health, why does a more religious culture like America’s seem beset by problems from which secular Europe apparently suffers less? The reader asserts: “Acceptance of the theory of evolution correlates with less…

In the spirit of looking facts in the face, let us admit what Jewish law actually prescribes: Abortion in the context of a non-Jewish nation like America is a death-penalty offense. My point is not that America should now write Biblical, Talmudic, or Maimonidean legislation into modern legal codes. The suggestion would be madness. But…

I’m a big fan of Rod Dreher. His Crunchy Con blog rarely fails to enlighten me, so I’ve been looking forward to his reflections on faith and science, generated by his current visit to Cambridge University as a Cambridge-Templeton fellow. Rod blogged today in response to a lecture and discussion in which evolution came up.…

This blog entry is being published automatically. I’m off Friday and Saturday for Shavuot, when Jews around the world observe the two-day festival that recalls the giving of the 10 Commandments at Mt. Sinai and the associated mass conversion of the assembled Israelites to the faith of Torah. I’ll be back with you on Sunday,…

My post on childless Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor provoked some interesting misunderstandings among commenters. I argued that the experience of raising kids potentially confers traits you’d want in a judge, more so than merely being Hispanic and female. Remember that it was Obama, not me, who raised the subject of an individual’s personal life…

Somebody should write a book with that title. Reason 142? Wikipedia. For all that I make use of this Web resource every day, I often get a queasy feeling about it. Many “facts” I’ve come across I know to be false or misleading, whether subtly or grossly, but there’s little you can do about it,…
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