More women in power may lead to a greater understanding of the challenges that family and work balances present, but a top-down approach—particularly in legislation—can’t bring the flexibility that each distinctive family and workplace needs. This is where real feminism begins—with the understanding that each woman’s family and workplace is unique. This feminism must center on respect for the choices she makes—whether that choice is about when she gets married, the number of children she has, or how many years... Read more

The kinds of governments that emerge from the Arab Spring have everything to do with answering the crucial question: Can a Muslim-majority country, freed from the strictures of dictatorship, bring forth and preserve a democracy that grants equal rights to minorities and women, protects free speech and political dissent, and does not insist on the imposition of Islamic law? Ramadan’s unwillingness to engage this question, in a book purportedly about the social and political future of the post-Arab Spring Middle... Read more

I recently visited Israel and the West Bank for the first time. I am Muslim and in Muslim communities around the world to visit Israel is to support “the Zionist entity” and therefore risk social isolation. Not only is this mind-set outdated, it is self-defeating. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/opinion/global/end-the-arab-boycott-of-israel.html?_r=0 Read more

Conservative values and money issues are worth less than concern for the poor. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324338604578326350052940798.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Read more

My Brittle Bones Genetic counseling clinics essentially promise to “purify” the genetic stock of the populace, believing this will provide lasting benefits to any nation. I beg to differ. The negative impact that abortion would undeniably have exerted upon my own family line confirms that no physician on earth could possibly foresee the life achievements of future descendants of frail parents. After my grandmother Jessie arrived in Australia nearly a century ago, few doctors would have looked at her tiny,... Read more

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe. What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=1 Read more

The controversial push to redefine marriage is one of the reasons the Conservatives came third in yesterday’s important by-election, critics say. – See more at: http://www.christian.org.uk/news/crisis-for-cameron-as-gay-marriage-row-aids-tory-defeat/#sthash.EGgxnqBZ.dpuf Read more

Emil Fackenheim (1916-2003), one of the great Jewish thinkers of the latter half of the 20th century, is in some danger of being remembered too much in conjunction with a number: 614. This is the number he famously ascribed to the commandment that the experience of the Holocaust had added, he maintained, to the original 613: “Thou shalt not hand Hitler posthumous victories. To despair of the God of Israel is to continue Hitler’s work for him.” This 1965 essay... Read more

Were the founding fathers good Christians? “Christian America” advocates like David Barton in- sist that they were, and that America ought now to reclaim its public Christian heritage. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, by contrast, asserts that the founders were militant secularists, who wanted to build a high wall of separation be- tween religion and government. Gregg Frazer, a history professor at The Master’s College, denies both claims, showing how all these ac- tivists have distorted... Read more

After Pope Benedict XVI’s surprising announcement that he would resign from the papacy, leading adherents of diverse faiths immediately began to evaluate his legacy. Catholic theologians have emphasized the enduring import of the thought of the man who spent most of his life as the theologian Joseph Ratzinger. Jewish leaders, meanwhile, have by and large celebrated the pope’s statements against anti-Semitism, promotion of interfaith amity, and the further improvement of Vatican-Israel relations. Yet there is one fascinating aspect of Benedict’s... Read more