Little people, big questions
| 7:00 AM Mar 1, 2010
We asked Lila, 7, Josie, 8, and Noemi, almost 5, a few questions: how do you picture God? Why does God allow evil in the world? Is God all-powerful?
You know, the little questions.
These imponderables may stump rabbis and philosophers, but children have their own ideas.
Stanley Moss is either the most religiously profane or profanely religious poet around
| 7:00 AM Dec 23, 2009
In Rejoicing: New and Collected Poems, Stanley Moss’s recently published collection, Moss quotes Baudelaire’s sly aphorism: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.” For more than 40 years, Moss has been addressing that sole being without worrying whether He exists or not.
The 84-year-old poet (who is also ...
New study says when we talk about God, we mean ourselves
| 12:00 PM Dec 7, 2009
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 ...
Terry Eagleton interviewed by JTS’s Arnie Eisen
| 2:11 PM Sep 11, 2009
Pairing a pugnacious British intellectual with an American Jewish religious leader for a public conversation on faith must be a lot of people’s idea of fun, because it’s happened in Manhattan two years in a row. The first time around was a bit more raucous: 2,000 people turned out to see Christopher Hitchens and Conservative ...
By rejecting Maimonides’ God, ‘New Yorker’ writer says
| 1:00 PM Aug 25, 2009
One of the difficulties of being an atheist is that the task of explaining just what it is one doesn’t believe in requires, to some degree, an idea of what God might be like, if one did believe in a Supreme Being. In this week’s New Yorker, James Wood examines the question of whether the ...
Goyishe Gov. Charlie Crist says yes
| 10:00 AM Aug 25, 2009
Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, says he has found the answer to a problem plaguing his state for decades: how to avoid hurricane damage. Addressing an assembly of Florida’s real-estate agents over the weekend, the governor, a devout Methodist, said that since 2007, he has been making annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, where he places ...
The impact belief systems have on our happiness
| 7:00 AM Jul 20, 2009
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.”
A Torah portion of omnipotence and violence
| 7:00 AM Jul 10, 2009
It might’ve been my brand new iPhone. It might’ve been the Torah portion. It might’ve been the relentless rain that, at some point, began to seem like a punishment from the heavens. Whatever it was, I recently had the strong urge to play God.
Faux paranoia, a subway skirmish, and a good call by God
| 5:15 PM Jul 1, 2009
• Everyone’s wondering, will Michael Jackson’s kids be raised by their Jewish mother? And if she used a donor egg, are they still Jews? [JTA]
• A Palestinian American comedian wrote a parodic column positing that Facebook is a Zionist conspiracy; too bad it’s so unfunny, some people might mistake it for an earnest theory. ...
Holy fireworks, non-revelations about God, and Eruv 2.0
| 5:46 PM Jun 24, 2009
• The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle suggests eight ways to make Independence Day more Jewish. One suggestion: to “let the sparks” of the fireworks “lift you to the world of the Zohar.” [WJC]
• An effort is underway to restore synagogues in west Afghanistan, where only one Jew remains. The project’s leader says she wants to find ...