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Kingdom of Priests

I may have been harsh on David Plotz and his book, The Good Book, about reading the Bible, in which case I apologize. Plotz himself fights back spiritedly in the comment box. When I’ve read his writing in the past, it’s always been charming and interesting. I’m sure the book is similarly well done, given…

Can you control your own evil impulses? Can you decide when to feel happy, angry, afraid? It sure doesn’t feel that way to me. Yet the premise of cognitive therapy, which a lot of people swear by, is that by thinking about your thoughts in a different way, you can change them. Interestingly, I came…

It always breaks my heart to see how simplemindedly the Hebrew Bible is discussed in the media. David Plotz, editor of Slate, has a new book out about the experience of trying to read the Bible straight through — apparently with no serious Jewish commentary, an impossibility for adults, I would think. Without the oral tradition…

A reader challenges me on my criticism of Christopher Buckley and his uncharitable published memories of his father and mother: “You wrote a memoir, and if memory serves painted a portrait of your adopted parents’ religiosity that some readers might have found uncomfortable or inappropriate.” It’s an interesting point. Where do legitimate public recollections about your…

Andrew Sullivan now seeks to invest his hyperventilating stance on torture with the dignity of a papal encyclical. He complains: “The point of torture is to violate the integrity of the human person and to coerce the will itself.” As I’ve already told you, I have the impression that much of the prosecutorial fervor on this…

My post from Monday “Slouching Toward Columbine: Darwin’s Tree of Death” continues to get comments, many poignantly indignant expressions of faith in “science”: What matters is the evidence for evolution and that evidence is massive and extremely powerful. The facts of evolution are the strongest facts of science. Why poignant? From my own post at…

Today and tomorrow are Rosh Chodesh, inaugurating a new month in the Hebrew calendar — the lunar month of Iyar.  In Jewish liturgy, there are various additions special to the day but my favorite is the conclusion of the morning prayer service with Psalm 104. It’s included because of the reference to the moon: “He…

As I mentioned in my post on Christopher Buckley’s unkind portrait of his parents, Bill and Pat Buckley, great fathers have a way of producing sons who go off the track. Maybe they don’t give them enough attention. That’s not really the point. What is? Let me offer a theory while, as promised, explaining why…

Christopher Buckley has an excerpt from his memoir about the loss of his parents, Mr. & Mrs. William F. Buckley, in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It’s affecting but uncomfortable in what I’d regard as the inappropriate detail he goes into about his parents’ faults and their physical decline at the end. How can…

The great psychologist writes wonderfully in “The Will to Believe” (1897): We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way….I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic…
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