Have you watched the new Netflix drama everyone’s talking about? It’s riveting: It tells the story of Jacob Cohen, a brilliant professor of English literature at an Ivy League university who grows tired of his community’s dogmatic narrow-mindedness. Sick of being unable to express his ideas . . . . Continue Reading »
America’s abortion regime and the absolutist ideology that animates it is part of a war by the powerful on the weak. This is true not only because it targets unborn children in the womb, the most helpless members of our society. It is also true because the regime is sustained by the rich while it . . . . Continue Reading »
In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court created a constitutional right of some human beings to kill other human beings. Specifically, the Court held that the Constitution of the United States creates a substantive individual liberty to procure or perform an abortion of a human . . . . Continue Reading »
“I painted to be loved.” That is how the artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) described his impulse to create. Bacon’s work came to be part of the canon of late twentieth-century British painting, hanging in major museums around the world. His brutal images of contorted bodies, slabs of meat, . . . . Continue Reading »
The Talmud relates the tragic story of an ancient Jewish sage named Elisha ben Abuyah. Initially one of his generation’s leading rabbinic luminaries, Elisha eventually became Judaism’s first unambiguous Epikoros, or theological apostate, earning the sobriquet Akher (“the . . . . Continue Reading »
Does anyone believe in astrology anymore? Is there anyone who still really thinks that our destinies are written in the sky? The answer is probably no. Maybe there’s some ancient black-clad Armenian peasant woman consulting an almanac every time she crosses the street—but for everyone else, . . . . Continue Reading »
I have always been somewhat bemused by the perennial popularity of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth—century novel about four New England sisters coming of age. At least once a decade a new film or television adaptation appears, and the list of successful women writers who . . . . Continue Reading »
Before #MeToo, before Black Lives Matter, Bessel van der Kolk argued for the centrality of trauma to human experience. President of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts, van der Kolk is author of The Body Keeps the Score, a book that has been a perennial best-seller since . . . . Continue Reading »
What historical claims does the Bible make about Adam and Eve? And is belief in a historical Adam and Eve compatible with the scientific evidence? In order to avoid the pitfalls of reading contemporary science into the biblical texts, it is best to treat these questions separately. Only after having . . . . Continue Reading »
An arching bridge that spans a crystal streamAttracts attention. People tend to pause,To gaze beneath the surface and to dreamTheir silent dreams: a knight without a cause;A painter who has put away her brush;An old philosopher. The waters rushUnceasingly across the sun-flecked bedOf sunken leaves, . . . . Continue Reading »
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