The Giuliani candidacy has polarized politically conservative Christians and Jews — perhaps less over Rudy’s position on abortion than, more subtly, over a question of emphasis. Who’s right? The Jewish “neoconservatives,” who make up more than half of Giuliani’s star foreign-policy advisory team (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and David Frum)? Or Christians, like Family Research Council Read More ›
In a strange irony, it has come to be the case that only Democrats now speak up for giving a role to faith in governance. Stranger still, they get away with it — which prompts the question: Why? In the accepted vocabulary of liberalism, the word “theocracy” functions as a synonym for “Silence them!” The word possesses awesome power to Read More ›
Here we go again, another Ann Coulter media blowup. This time, however, there is a serious point worth drawing from the episode. Coulter’s latest contested comments were delivered on CNBC to Donny Deutsch on his show The Big Idea. She offered the opinion that Jews need to be “perfected” by becoming Christians. Deutsch, who is Jewish, spluttered about “how hateful, Read More ›
William JamesIn the Maelstrom of American Modernismby Robert D. RichardsonHoughton Mifflin, 622 pp., $30 The series of New Atheist tracts that have shot up the bestseller list seem like distress flares launched from the deck of a foundering ship at sea. Surely the enthusiastic reception bestowed on these books, led by Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’s Read More ›
I’m always stirred by the seemingly primitive features of Jewish religious observance. On Yom Kippur, celebrated this Shabbat, we read from the book of Leviticus about the sending away of a sacrificial goat to the Judean wilderness, bearing to its death the combined sins of the people. Judaism’s insistence on animal sacrifice must strike many Jews today as embarrassing. But Read More ›
Republicans have been racing to decry Idaho senator Larry Craig as “disgusting,” “disgraceful” — the words chosen respectively by Mitt Romney and John McCain. In the competition to appear utterly pitiless, Romney pulled ahead fast. The Massachusetts Adonis himself seems perfect in every way, inhumanly so — except for precisely this same vaguely inhuman quality that, I predict, will prove Read More ›
This article, published by National Review, contains an interview with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer: David Klinghoffer is worried about the atmosphere of secularism that rains down like nuclear fallout, spreading contamination and offers the Ten Commandments as a desperately needed diagnostic tool to combat it. The rest of the article can be found here.
Is morality based on some essential truth or is it defined by society? In this highly original critique of American social mores and popular culture, David Klinghoffer argues that the Ten Commandments are essential to maintaining a morally healthy society. With the meticulousness of a scholar, he begins by excavating the meaning of the Commandments. Drawing on the millennia-old rabbinical Read More ›
SEATTLE – Is morality based on some essential truth or is it defined by society? In this highly original critique of American social mores and popular culture, Shattered Tablets (Doubleday), author David Klinghoffer argues that the Ten Commandments are essential to maintaining a morally healthy society. “My main point is that the steady evaporation of religious culture will have very Read More ›
You’ve heard of the trade deficit and attention deficit disorder. Well, several strands of discontent in American life can be traced to what I call the “Authority Deficit.” Whether the context is President Bush’s conduct of the Iraq war, cops unable to make city streets safe or parents struggling to rein in unruly children, authority figures seem increasingly unconfident. It’s Read More ›