More in ‘belief’

Does belief in God provide the faithful with an ethical compass driven by a morality that exists outside themselves? Or does belief in God merely enable the faithful to have pretty much whatever ethics they want to have, and then retroactively justify them by attributing them to God? A new study out of the University ...

My 4-year-old daughter Maxine has been obsessed with a book about Noah’s Ark (which she calls Noah’s Work of Art). The other day, I asked her about the portrayal of God she was picking up from it. “God is the person who makes the laws,” she said confidently. “And if you break them you are in big, big trouble.”

Since childhood, writer Nelly Reifler has fixated on questions of mortality, morality, and the existence of God. Now, as a Nextbook columnist she gets to plumb the minds of those around her—from the neighborhood barista to the rabbi who married her—for their answers to these questions.
Nextbook decided it was time to turn the ...

Earlier this month, my pseudonym, Fiona Rosenbloom, came out with her first young-adult novel. (Mazel Tov, Fiona!) The novel centers on Jewish themes and is called You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! Here’s how that happened: A month before the release of my own decidedly R-rated first novel, I was approached by ...