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No Moses at AIPAC this morning, but Joshua! “Together, we can join our voices together, and in doing so make even the mightiest of walls fall down.” And a life narrative that aligns his story with the great Jewish story — and the great American story — the search for the Promised Land. I first…

Three-year-olds can’t really know, but I tried to tell my daughters at breakfast what this morning really means: That anybody can grow up to be president of the United States. That anything really is possible. That pyramids can be flipped. I know that he’s not president yet; that she (the first woman!) is not going…

From a NYT profile of Lee Child: He is the sort of person who carefully outlines his replies, explaining that there are three reasons for this or two causes of that, and he has a mind that’s a midden of trivia. He knows why watches in ads are always set at 8 minutes past 10,…

The headlins focus on the inflammatory rhetoric from the president, and John McCain ranted — and exaggerated — yesterday at AIPAC about Iran’s threat to Israel, but, once again, the real news is more subtle, and more promising. STATE DEPARTMENT officials commonly complain that without an embassy in Iran, the United States cannot decipher the…

Its nickname: Evogod. God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out perhaps because they are impressed…

Zogby has released a new survey of book-reading habits in America. Over 80% said they prefer to curl up with a printed book over using the latest in reading technology. Women (85%) are more likely than men (79%) to say they prefer reading printed books. Reading printed books also has greater appeal among older respondents,…

If current trends continue. These sorts of metrics are often silly — and this one seems so, too — but it does prove a point. Want a growing business: Converting churches into condos. European languages required. Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those…

Apparently Italians think so. Cheer up, Americans, your Bible knowledge is better than Italians. Pasta is bad for your piety. Italy professes to be a Catholic nation – but a majority of Italians do not know “even the most basic facts” about the Bible, according to a survey. The international poll, conducted by Eurisko for…

Yet more news today in the Obama and Exodus front. In an interview that Jeffrey Goldberg has now posted on his new blog, Obama talks about his appreciation of the Leon Uris novel Exodus. Obama and I spoke over the weekend about Hamas, about Jimmy Carter, and about the future of Jewish settlements on the…

Interesting language in a Bob Novak column: John McCain, who has spent the last two months trying to consolidate right-wing support as the Republican candidate for president, has a problem of disputed dimensions with a vital component of the conservative coalition: the evangelicals. The biggest question is whether Mike Huckabee is part of the problem…

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