More in ‘religion’

CREDIT: Leela Corman
For lunch today I ate a pastrami sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, and it was delicious. I can already hear you—and my dead grandmother—groaning: oy, what a goyishe deli sandwich. To be honest, it wasn’t my fault. I did it in solidarity with my kids.
Children can do that to a person. One ...

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 ...

Day-to-day operations in the Israel Defense Force often expose soldiers to a host of ideological conflicts: between settlers and Palestinians, right- and left-wing perspectives on a two-state solution, and of course, as has been in the news a lot lately, between secular and religious Jews. The IDF itself mandates a “code of ethics and ideological ...

Even without its subtitle, there could be no doubt about which group is being discussed in Religion or Ethnicity?: Jewish Identities in Evolution, the new collection of essays edited by Zvi Gitelman. No other people occupies precisely the same ambiguous position between religion and ethnicity as the Jews, or has to wrestle with the many ...

It’s an old argument: are Jews are a religious group, an ethnic group with a religious component, a self-determined community, or is there some more essential racial component to being Jewish? The Daily Beast reports on new evidence confirming an genetically based, inborn Jewish je ne sais quoi—and notes that the genetic marker is turning ...

In 1998, Lauren Sandler began work on a series on youth and religion for NPR. Her research took her to a small church in Seattle that attracted skateboarders, punks and hipsters decked out in vintage fashion – all of whom were exceptionally well-versed in the bible.
Nearly a decade later, Sandler is still tracking an ...

Eve Grubin has read and written poetry for as long as she can remember. Her interest in Jewish texts and religious observance came much later in life.
In her first poetry collection, Morning Prayer, Grubin seeks to bring these two passions together, with poems that explore her forays into ritual and faith. She talks ...