Religion and Civic Life

Some members of America’s political and cultural elite have been having a tough time lately distinguishing between the political philosophy of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that of our country’s religious conservatives. Ahmadinejad is a classic theocrat whose regime subjects his country to religious law. Can we say the same of a Christian like George W. Bush? Perhaps so, according Read More ›

The weeks preceding the saddest of Jewish holy days, Tisha b’Av, have seen remarkable displays of anti-Jewish sentiment, from the deadly to the merely despicable. As Israel was slammed with long-range rockets from Hezbollah, the world’s “civilized” nations (with a few exceptions, including the United States) condemned the Jewish state for striking back in self-defense. In Seattle, where I live, Read More ›

BETRAYING SPINOZA: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us ModernityBy Rebecca GoldsteinSchocken, 287 pages$19.95 WITH most people, if they know anything about the philosopher Benedic tus Spinoza, it’s his sensational-sounding excommunication by the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656 at age 24. But Jewish-style excommunication sounds more awesome than it was. Its impact was merely social. Until the excommunicated person changed his Read More ›

If you’ve seen Al Gore’s global-warming scare movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” you may have come away as I did, wondering about the highly partisan nature of the climate-change debate. Why is it partisan at all? If carbon-dioxide emissions are perilously raising global temperatures, surely that’s a problem which can be left to scientists and other non-ideological experts. That’s a big Read More ›

David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow in Discovery Institute’s program on Religion and Civic Life, and a frequent writer on other topics, including evolution, is a First Place winner of the prestigious Rockower Awards for journalism excellence, it has been announced. Founded in 1980 to encourage Jewish media to improve their publications and to promote high quality journalism by Jewish writers, Read More ›

The fast-emerging Religious Left contrasts sharply on many issues–from homosexual marriage to socialized medicine–with its longer established competitor, the Religious Right. Yet these two Bible-citing political movements equally have woken up to the realization that there is something intrinsically American about using the Bible as a guide to practical politics. That’s good news, and a blow to secularist orthodoxy. As Read More ›

With a touch of divine providence, the debate about illegal immigration is heating up just as Jews prepare for Shavuot. The two-day festival starting the evening of June 1, called Pentecost in English, marks the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. The holiday’s most sweetly recalled feature, though, is the reading of the Scriptural book of Read More ›

The Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph were compelled to live, sometimes uncomfortably, as immigrants in Egypt, as their descendants, the Israelites, would also. Is the Bible telling us that welcoming immigrants is a moral priority? The question, obviously, is highly relevant with the Senate resuming debate on immigration in the wake of President Bush’s Monday-night address. While the Left typically resists Read More ›

As the current U.S. immigration policy clash—what to do about illegal aliens and insecure borders—heats up, many Americans have turned to scripture for guidance. Jewish scripture, for example, speaks repeatedly of the kindness due to the “stranger” and reminds us that the people of the Bible—the Hebrews—were once despised foreigners in an alien land, Egypt.  Yet the Bible’s message isn’t Read More ›

With less than three weeks before the May 19 release of the Sony Pictures version of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, worries continue to mount among Christians about both the book’s and the movie’s impact. But should non-Christians be concerned, too? Absolutely. Jews in particular need to be aware of the gift mega-selling Dan Brown has given, in all innocence, to Read More ›

Every generation has it unique ways of violating the Ten Commandments, so I suppose every generation also deserves its own Ten Commandments movie dramatizing how Moses received the two tablets of the Law. Inevitably, these also seem to reveal the ways in which the creators of those depictions fail to grasp what makes the Decalogue, as the Ten Commandments are Read More ›