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Kingdom of Priests

Because of my sore knee, it follows that there this is no God. You think I’m kidding but this line of reasoning is commonly heard from devotees of evangelizing atheism like Richard Dawkins. It’s the argument from seemingly poor, botched, or suboptimal design. Yet the Hebrew Bible alerts us early on that creation is afflicted with…

A reader, Sarah, wrote a poignant comment under an earlier post that pulled at my heart and that I thought deserved a more prominent response. She movingly regrets that she finds it impossible to discover enchantment in Orthodox Judaism or any other Jewish movement. There’s much in what she says that I agree with, and…

In response to an offhanded comment I made referring to “naive creationists,” I received an email from a self-defined creationist, objecting to my characterization. I don’t want to get into a debate about evolution here, but I will say I was struck, as I have been before, by the courtesy and civility of the email.…

I heard an interesting insight from a rabbi friend today on the 17th-century hymn “Shalom Aleichem,” sung on Friday night before the Sabbath dinner. The song welcomes “ministering angels, angels of the Most High” and asks them, “Bless me with peace, angels of peace,” before, in the very next stanza, bidding them farewell, “Go in…

In introducing Dungeons & Dragons to my oldest son, Ezra (age 8), I was amused, bemused and ever so slighted worried by his instant attraction to wanting his character to be a druid. In D&D, druids are kind of lame characters to play so I managed to talk him out of it. An angle on the…

We’ve discussed before the question of what constitutes the “image of God” inscribed in the human body. The issue came up in the context of devotees of theistic evolution like Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller who say there’s no problem for their Biblical faith in thinking God relied on a chance-driven evolutionary process to produce…

I’m preoccupied by the old wives’ tale that Judaism has no missionary or conversionary genes in its spiritual DNA. This is one of those untruths that gets repeated so often, it’s taken for granted even by many thoughtful Jews. Maimonides, Sforno, and Rav Hirsch refute it soundly, as I’ve indicated before. Here’s more proof, that…

Let’s talk about a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: enchantment. As often happens to me, and probably to you too, a number of things going on in my life have converged to get me contemplating a particular idea that I hadn’t thought much about before. One is a game called Dungeons &…

Why am I hoping that Roland Emmerich’s disaster epic 2012 stays spectacularly on top of the box office this coming weekend? I’ve seen the movie and, while you’re not supposed to admit this in public if you want to be thought of as sophisticated, I found it utterly gripping if cartoonish and a bit too…

Yesterday’s entry on ideas and their consequences suggests a further thought on Major Nidal Hasan. Is Hasan a “terrorist”? Or as I’d prefer to say, a traitor turned enemy combatant?  I’ve long been irritated by the idea, frequently heard from conservatives, that America is or should be engaged in a “war with radical Islam,” a…
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