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Kingdom of Priests

A commenter on my previous entry about God’s “tinkering” with nature asks: If God interferes (making miracles, making species) to show us that he and we are free, then why doesn’t he make that more transparent?  Why is it so hard to distinguish between [God’s] actions and the results of natural law and chance? Surely…

Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed asks, “Why would God design a world where he needed to tinker constantly to make things work?” OK, JC, I’ll take you up on that. The same blog post suggests that the idea of intelligent design hasn’t stood up “well to the test” of science.  In my line of work, we get JC’s…

Sigh. Our son Ezra, age 7, fears the Jackal god. That would be Ezra who attends an Orthodox Jewish (actually, Chabad) elementary school and studies the weekly Torah portion. I gave him a copy of a book I liked when I was a kid, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, an Alfred Hitchcock “Three Investigators”…

A couple of times I’ve come across the Rev. Billy Graham’s syndicated newspaper columns — yes, they are still being published — and on both occasions he was answering a letter from a reader who was perplexed upon trying to read the Hebrew Bible, or “Old Testament.” The column that was in yesterday’s papers is…

Responding to my post on the Columbine shooting and the social consequences of Darwinism, some objecting readers argued that the Bible, after all, has also inspired evil acts. Which is true, of course, but misses the point. Biblical faith has been used for good and abused for evil. That’s why we can justifiably speak of…

The Da Vinci Code author is finally coming out on September 15 with his new title, expected to go to press with an initial run of 5 million copies. I can’t wait, and I’m entirely serious about that. He’s a fabulous storyteller. Yet a note of warning to my fellow Jews who dismissed Catholic complaints…

Jews read the Torah in a yearly cycle, one portion per Sabbath. Now that Passover is past, we’re back to the regular schedule. This week’s reading is Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus 12:1-15:33), and it’s not an easy read. Not only because the subject matter is displeasing — a kind of skin disease, not leprosy but that’s often…

It’s always a hoot to be fired upon by Little Green Footballs. A friend emails, “He proved himself a demagogue by what he didn’t quote” from my earlier post. Last time this happened, I wrote a series at Evolution News & Views analyzing that odd but extremely popular blog’s stance — read Part I, Part II,…

Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist and sometimes hailed as the world’s smartest man, is reported “very ill” and as having been rushed to the hospital. Newspaper writers are working on obituaries. An interesting sidelight, that one hopes will not prove poignant too, is the little reported challenge Dr. Hawking makes in his work to a most…

I received an email from a Jewish historian and journalist I respect very much, including this thought: I envy your finding [spiritual life] “at home” so to speak in Judaism, but alas the worship of a Jewish God who found the Holocaust necessary for his “plan” is just impossible for me. Obviously he’s not the…
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