Today is the Day of Atonement, which concludes the High Holy Days. The 1901-06 Jewish Encyclopedia (which might be comparable in tone and content to the 1914 Catholic Encyclopedia, but still fascinating if outdated in some respects) is online. Here is part of the entry on Yom Kippur: In rabbinic Judaism the Day of Atonement…

Speaking of English saints (or would-be saints, as in the case of Newman, below)…In today’s NYtimes, reviewer Ben Brantley broaches the unspeakable: Is it heresy to whisper that the sainted Thomas More is a bit of a bore? Even Frank Langella, an actor who can be counted on to put the pepper in mashed-potato parts,…

Was Cardinal Newman gay? Or (as the joke has it) simply divine? That was the controversy that dominated the dust-up over exhuming John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English convert to Rome, in order to move his body to a more suitable location for veneration–that in anticipation of his beatification (the penultimate step to canonization)…

“The first Jew to address a Vatican synod said on Monday that wartime Pope Pius XII should have done more to help Jews during the Holocaust.” That’s the lead on the incisive Reuters story about Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen of Haifa, in Israel, who told Reuters he might have stayed away if he had known the…

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