Archive

I recently attended two conversations under the aegis of the Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions initiative. Both dealt with whether God exists”one directly, the other obliquely, by asking whether science...

The idea of a social contract first makes its appearance in Plato’s Republic . Men are naturally prone to commit injustice, and thus injustice is naturally good, Glaucon, one...

For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity by Irving Greenberg Jewish Publications Society of America, 274 pp. $20 paper The title of...

This year marks the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America. In 1654, twenty-three Jews arrived in Dutch New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, fleeing the Inquisition. Although not...

There is a pamphlet making its way, via the Internet, through the Modern Orthodox stream of the American Jewish community. Written by Gil Perl and Yaakov Weinstein, graduate students...

Since September 11, President Bush has placed much of his domestic policy agenda on hold. Yet we would be wrong to conclude from his recent emphasis on foreign affairs...

Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity By Steven B. Smith Yale University Press. 270 pp. $30 Spinoza has had an umistakable appeal for free thinkers-Jewish and gentile-over...

For some decades, American Jews have made sense of the relation between their Americanness and their Jewishness through the concept of cultural pluralism. This concept allowed a flexible but...

Autonomy means to live under one’s own law: to discover the norms of a lawful life, a nomos, by or within oneself. Thus it is not, in principle, anarchic...

The Idea of Civil Society by adam seligman free press, 220 pages, $24.95 Adam Seligman’s book, while primarily a theoretical, historical, and social inquiry into the notion of civil...

Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow by Hans Küng, translated by John Bowden Crossroad, 753 pages, $39.50 Readers of Catholic maverick Hans Küng’s works have come to expect of him...

Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew by Eugene Borowitz Jewish Publication Society, 319 pages, $24.95 Eugene Borowitz, the leading theologian associated with the Reform movement of...

What do modern Jewish thinkers make of Christianity? Is Christianity in their eyes still the oppressive, pervasive presence that medieval Jews experienced as Christendom? Is Christianity held to be...