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In the last month, two people that I’ve critiqued in this column have replied and created fruitful dialogues. J. Brown, a teacher whom I respect for his intellectual fortitude, just […]

To Orthodox Jews, eruvin are a crucial component to their faith. To everybody else, it is as if they didn’t even exist

1. Is the Purpose of Life to Make Babies? Why are we here? To fullfil some grand purpose or merely to perpetuate our genes? Is the act of helping to ensure […]

The Holocaust is a touchy subject anywhere on earth, but touchiest at the capitol of the country where “The Final Solution” began. Germany and its capitol, Berlin, still struggle with […]

One of the more ubiquitous statements that has emerged over the last decade, ‘Spiritual, Not Religious’ is a self-affirming antidote to the traditional trappings of religion, the archaic and inflexible […]

Swamped this week. Here’s a post originally published on my personal blog to fill the void.  Like many features of the human condition, the first psychological account of disgust comes […]

While strife is bound to happen between different religious communities, there is no occasion to apologize. Alain de Botton says it’s awkward to apologize, after all. “This could lead to […]

We’re simply not good at apologizing. It’s awkward at best, says Alain de Botton, and at its worst an apology could lead to “an escalation in anger.” That is why atonement is effective, as a ritual of mutual apologies. 

In his recent post, fellow Big Think blogger Adam Lee blames the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict on competing religious fundamentalisms. The recent renewal of fighting on the Gaza border, he writes,  […]

For all the ugliness of Nazism in thought and deed, it’s striking to consider just how much they contemplated the arts. From the failed painter Adolf Hitler to the failed […]

God know we would have satellites one day, so He left us a message 

A strong turnout at the New York Mets’ baseball stadium gave the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community an opportunity to address ‘serious family-related problems’ caused by the Internet. 

The course of anti-semitism from ancient times to now has been written about and discussed, but the authors have come up short in one way or another. The true root of this 2,000-year-old history has yet to be truly contextual, comprehensive, detailed and analytical in a manner that is coherent.

When a German court in Cologne ruled last month that baby boys could not be circumcised for religious reasons, Jewish and Muslim groups erupted in protest while a chorus of […]

Noah Millman intervenes sensibly in the great Douthat–Sanchez debate about morality and religion: Okay, so humanists don’t have strong reasons for their faith in human rights. Do Christians have strong […]

It was only about a century ago that Easter was considered by some Christians to be a good day for massacring Jews. Consider, for instance, the first Kishinev pogrom of […]

(Note: This review was solicited and is written in accordance with my policy for such reviews.) Summary: A memoir of escape from the overbearing, oppressive life of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but […]

The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son on Mount Moriah is one of the formative myths of Western monotheism. And most theists of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions […]

The world is increasingly taking notice of the turmoil brewing in Israel, where a growing culture war between the rest of Israeli society and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, or “haredim”, […]

One of the traditions of my old site was, at the end of each year, to choose a selection of my favorite posts from throughout the year and highlight them […]

One hypothesis for the origin of religion is that it’s a kind of “costly signaling” – a way for people to prove their loyalty to the group by participating in […]

The world population, by U.N. estimates, has just surpassed seven billion, and it’s growing even faster than demographers’ predictions. Nicholas Kristof has an insightful column (though I depart from him […]

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my wife and I have for several years been attending a Unitarian Universalist church in the New York area. Unitarian Universalism is officially a […]

This piece was originally published on AlterNet. When America was founded, it was the first modern nation to throw off the rule of absolute monarchy and prove that democracy was […]

“Resist what resists in you,” the god Krishna tells heroic Arjuna in Peter Brook’s epic theatrical version of The Mahabharata. “Become yourself!” This is, as the experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe […]

Okay, at the risk of being labeled a Scrooge, I’m going to say it, because one of the things we bloggers do is challenge each other (hopefully politely) to spark […]

The biggest problem that the Church faces in backing off its condemnation of contraception is a potential loss of religious authority, which is no small matter in a hierarchical church.

There is a popular narrative in the West that Islam is sexist. But aside from fundamentalist practices like honor killings, does moderate Islam actually deny women freedoms?

The U.K.’s top rabbi hopes to make the country’s Jewish voice “much more self-confident and willing to engage with the world.”

Pigs (or hogs, or swine, or Sus – the Latin name for the species) are  omnivorous mammals of Eurasian origin, closely related to hippopotami and generally more known for being tasty than clever […]