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Kingdom of Priests

That’s better. A while back I noted that I’d lost patience with sock puppetry in the comments threads here. In case you notice anything missing, I just took a moment and cleared out all the comments from our main sock puppet visitor who goes by various names and genders but always sounds the same —…

Now those crazed “birthers” are demanding to know if President Obama is circumcised, by way of establishing his country of origin! Can you believe the chutzpah? The excellent Tablet web magazine points this out. What sane and decent American would ever raise such an inappropriate question? (Note the date of the preceding link.)

I was in Tully’s for coffee today and had a book with Hebrew in it with me. Along with my kippah, this caught the eye of a very sweet lady with long grey hair and a big t-shirt boldly printed with swooshing letters, “JESUS!” For whatever reason, Christians don’t witness to me very often —…

Isn’t it funny how according to the stereotype, it’s us on the Right side of the political spectrum who are supposed to be the Bible-thumping pourers of fire and brimstone down upon the heads of our political opposites — yet somehow whenever you hear a politician or political activist accusing critics of violating the Ten…

If I may amplify my previous post on evolutionary psychology, we’re supposed to be believe that DNA, while directing only the production of proteins and other cell components, is ultimately in charge of everything else about us too — as David Berlinski puts it, “altruism, date rape, aggression, eating disorders, and a taste for Mansfield Park,”…

I like Robert Wright and enjoyed his recent book The Evolution of God. One thing I value about him is his candor. Thus in his New York Times op-ed yesterday proposing a “grand bargain” between religion and science (i.e., Darwinism), he can’t help but blurt out what would be asked in this bargain even of…

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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