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There seem to be two kinds of religious people (along with countless other distinctions you could make). One kind finds the outré aspects of his faith uncomfortable to contemplate and seeks strategies for explaining them away, or disregarding them altogether. He respects the authority of secular thought, perhaps too much. The other delights in those same…

In Judaism, special occasions are almost invariably solemnized over a cup of wine — for example, the benediction Kiddush said at home to inaugurate the Sabbath as I’ll be doing shortly, or at Havdalah on the Sabbath’s departure. Traditionally, following the Grace After Meals, there’s a further blessing over a cup of wine. A wedding…

Not long ago, I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which I briefly alluded to Jewish and Christian beliefs about the Afterlife. Just before the piece was to be put to bed, I got a querying phone call from my editor, who was not Jewish. She said that her Jewish colleagues had…

For those who were wondering about my immediately previous entry: When the classical Torah commentator Abraham ibn Ezra spoke of a “heretic” who challenges the simple in faith about God’s existence, but who gets an adequate response only from the discerning Jew who contemplates nature’s intelligent design, the word that Ibn Ezra uses for “heretic”…
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