The Real Lesson of Tisha B’Av: Standing Up for Values, Even at the Cost of Division Within the Jewish Community 

Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, comes this year at a particularly fraught moment for the Jewish people. The only surviving architectural element of the Temple, its western restraining wall, has become a site of contention both between different religious movements and between world Jewry and […]

The Jew’s Lament

The Jews’ saddest day is the Ninth of Av, which this year is Tuesday. During a fast as long and stringent as Yom Kippur, the children of Israel chant dirges mourning their alienation from God. Study of sacred texts, excepting certain theodicical and funereal writings, is forbidden, limiting the greatest intellectual expression of a Jew’s love […]

When Progressives Embrace Hate 

A mere half-year ago, before collusion and Comey, before Mika’s face and Muslim bans and the Mooch, there was a shining moment where millions of Americans flooded the streets in cities across the country to register their rage that an unapologetic misogynist had just been made leader of the free world. Donald Trump’s election was a watershed […]

How Christian conservatives are breeding Bolsheviks 

Earlier this week I asked why conservative Christian outlets are increasingly promoting socialist ideas and policies. Yesterday, my friend Jake Meador weighed in to help provide some perspective on… Source: How Christian conservatives are breeding Bolsheviks – Acton Institute PowerBlog

Democrats’ trust-busting hypocrisy

Some progressives are disappointed that the Democratic Party’s “Better Deal” agenda for the 2018 midterms doesn’t go the Full Bernie. Sure, the Democrats are proposing a minimum wage hike and anti-trust reforms. But there’s no single-payer health care or free college tuition to be found. Still, “Better Deal” suggests that centrist, pro-business Clintonites are in full retreat. […]

Academic Biblical Criticism Is Not Corrupt

Don’t dismiss all perspectives of contemporary biblical scholarship as the imaginative or tainted products of liberal bias. Joshua Berman’s essay, “The Corruption of Biblical Studies,” purports to provide an “insider’s tour of today’s field of biblical studies.” In it, he tells a story of how biblical scholarship became slave to putatively pseudo-scientific ideas about its character […]