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Kingdom of Priests

At last, I have something to say about Tiger Woods! And I have mathematician and bon vivant David Berlinski to thank. There’s been an unwritten law in force around the Internet the past few weeks that every blogger must register impassioned views on Mr. Woods’s philandering, either “Tut tut!” or “Yowza!” or similar. I came up…

Under my post The Jewish Case for Christmas, there was starting to develop a thread of conversation that I didn’t feel comfortable with. One reader cast up a bunch of quotes he found on the Internet about Jesus as portrayed in the Talmud while another reader, a frequent, thoughtful, and most welcome commenter, tried to…

It’s somehow cheering to know that while the pompous know-nothingism of Darwinian atheists in the U.S. is matched by those in England, so too not only in our country but in theirs the screechy ignorance receives its appropriate reply from people with good sense and an open mind. Some of the latter include atheists who,…

There’s an absurd Internet debate going on among Jews seeking on the most ridiculous grounds to impugn Joe Lieberman’s Jewishness for standing athwart ObamaCare and yelling “Stop!” In the debate about health-care reform, they demand to know, why can’t he just talk and think in conformity with the ethnic stereotype that instructs Jews that we…

I happened to overhear recently when a friend of mine asked the poised young wife of a Chabad rabbi if her family celebrates Thanksgiving. In general, ultra-Orthodox Jews shy away from marking non-Jewish holidays. “No,” she answered with sort of a secret smile, “but we do appreciate it.” This is exactly how I think of…

At his website Why Evolution Is True, Jewish atheist and U. of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has responded in two posts to my own entry on Chanukah, knee pain, and suboptimal design in creatures as a bogus argument for atheism. (As an aside, note the gentleman’s last name. I’m guessing it started out as Cohen,…

A dear friend chides me by email for saying that we are going through a period when there’s a Jewish charisma deficit. She cites several rabbis in her area who are gifted teachers, who make rabbinic texts really come alive, and I don’t doubt that it is true. This caused me to wonder how, really,…

In a little write-up on a panel in New York of ex-Evangelical Christians turned secular literary intellectuals, Tablet magazine quotes critic James Wood of The New Yorker on Isaac Newton: Isaac Newton could quite happily exist today if he was Jewish. He’d be living on the Upper West Side and going to one of those…

Shmuley Boteach contributes a gracious and insightful essay of appreciation on Chabad in the Forward. Gracious because despite emerging from Chabad himself and subsequently meeting with disapproval from the movement and parting ways, he is far from having turned against them: Chabad has been the love of my life since I was 10 years old.…

Reader Paul Burnett taunts me: Go ahead, David, say it: “Darwin taught Hitler (and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot) how to kill millions of people.” That is of course a ridiculous parody of what I’ve written on Darwinism and its historical consequences, and I’ve never written a word about Darwin-Mao, but…now that you mention…
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