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Kingdom of Priests

I’ve often thought the controversy around capital punishment, with life imprisonment as the proposed alternative, has things backward. It’s not the former that should be controversial but the latter. The sickening Phillip Garrido/Jaycee Dugard story — of child kidnapping, imprisonment, rape — recalls an item of Torah wisdom about prison itself. Rav Hirsch reflects, “Punishments…

In the always lively Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Rabbi Elliot Dorff writes in a cover essay that “support for universal health care is an imperative in Jewish law.” Is it now? On health care reform, Rabbi Dorff has his classical sources all lined up — most having to do with obligations on the community…

The imbroglio over editorial policy at Bloggingheads.tv would be of minor interest if it didn’t present such an evocative window on the psychology of the Darwin-believing community. Did you ever think about what actually drives these people? To recap: Robert Wright, the site’s editor-in-chief, was out of the shop when his staff pulled down an…

“Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge” (Isaiah 3:13). In a comments thread we’ve been having a sad but fascinating conversation with a well meaning Jew who seems on the verge of conversion to Catholicism. He wrote an initial comment claiming to be that person who I said doesn’t exist:…

When I wrote earlier on the Stalinist erasure of John McWhorter’s interview with biochemist Michael Behe on Bloggingheads.tv, I began by saying, “Wow.” I will say that again: “Wow.” Why wow? Because Bloggingheads editor-in-chief Robert Wright was, as I’d suspected, out of the shop when it happened — on a silent meditation retreat, in fact…

In the thread on Robert Novak’s death, a reader, Range Rover, leaves this heart-breaking comment on the theme of conversion to other faiths: There is another reason Jews convert to other religions: There is for some of us an emptiness in Judaism, with its emphasis on ritual and its continual emphasis on how “nonhuman” G-d…

Wow. This is positively Stalinist. Robert Wright’s Bloggingheads.tv has abruptly removed an interview it put up hours before in which linguist Dr. John McWhorter talks with biochemist Dr. Michael Behe about Behe’s The Edge of Evolution. It’s a fascinating exchange. McWhorter starts off by saying that while his own writing has been primarily on race,…

Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s an example of why maybe it’s forgivable that Jews reading the Hebrew Bible and its traditional commentators and elucidations could be forgiven for wondering if God at times in fact takes on at least the appearance of physical form. On the Ten Commandments, Rashi explains the first commandment’s reference…

Last night as I was warming up dinner I was listening as usual to Coast to Coast AM with its millions of listeners and I was wondering, why does experience of paranormal activity only seem to happen to people with regional accents — primarily Southern but not always? Ghosts, UFOs, demons, remote viewing — these…

In an earlier post on the top 10 misunderstandings about Judaism — I called them “lies,” though admittedly that was intended as a bit of a provocation — I mentioned that the chief Jewish objection to Christianity shouldn’t be, as you often hear, that Jews always and everywhere viewed with abhorrence the idea that God…
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