The latest proposed amendment to the HHS mandate still draws on empirically unsound data and violates religious freedom. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/02/7847/?utm_source=RTA+Alvare+New+HHS+Rule&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more

The NALC organized soon after the 2009 decisions of the ELCA to jettison traditional Christian sexual ethics. It is trying to be a centrist Lutheran church, perhaps the last hope for such a church in North America. Though it is building cordial relationships with the LCMS, there will be distinct limits as to how far they can proceed. But in the realm of public witness by the church and its laity and associations, the LCMS has it right. The NALC... Read more

The great divide in American religion today is no longer between Protestant and Catholic or even between Christian and Jew; it is between the liberal and the conservative versions of these great historic faiths. http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/02/02/americas-religious-divide/ Read more

I think it is best to deal with modern biblical scholarship not by hiding from it, but by understanding that its underpinnings are based on a conception of Scripture that is altogether alien to Judaism and, frankly, to everything other scholars and I have discovered about the very idea of Scripture as found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient texts. http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/conversation-with-james-kugel-about-revelation/ Read more

In the last half-century, Egyptian Coptic Christians (roughly 10 percent of Egypt’s 80 million) have been suffering from increasing discrimination and persecution. Due to rising Islamic extremism, tensions between Egypt’s majority Muslim population and its Coptic minority have resulted in even more violence against this ancient religious minority. What is often reported as a sectarian dispute is rapidly becoming a systematic and often deadly targeting of Egypt’s largest minority. http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/in-egypt-the-warning-signs-of-genocide/ Read more

Last week a writer named Mary Elizabeth Williams penned an essay for the liberal web magazine Salon in which she explained, in great detail, why she is absolutely convinced that life begins at conception, that every fetus is really just an unborn child, and that women should be free to kill this life, via abortion, at any point during their pregnancy. http://click1.updates.weeklystandard.com/ViewMessage.do?m=khhlrrfv&r=ibzbygyh&s=ihdzfbphdcthmprbdtqphmdckvvtppvvvvr&a=view Read more

Jonathan Sacks The revelation at Mount Sinai – the central episode not only of parshat Yitro, but of Judaism as a whole – was unique in the religious history of mankind. Other faiths (Christianity and Islam) have claimed to be religions of revelation, but in both cases the revelation of which they spoke was to an individual (“the son of G-d,” “the prophet of G-d”). Only in Judaism was G-d’s self-disclosure not to an individual (a prophet) or a group... Read more

He and Marion established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for the Humanities to fund scholarships and charitable organizations. On the advice of friends, the Wiesels invested all their savings—business and personal—with a financier who promised a 12 percent annual return. His name: Bernard Madoff. http://www.jidaily.com/a1bec?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=48ed7fb439-Insider&utm_medium=email   Read more

The triumph of the mandate, then, holds out the possibility that a major American church may be broken asunder under the pressure of government, and the adherents of its traditional teachings reduced to second-class citizenship, not because of any wrong they have done, but merely because they do not do good in the manner that contemporary liberals expect. We must ask ourselves: What in the world does such a future have in common with American liberalism’s repeated assurances that it... Read more

Why worry about same-sex marriage in particular? Why worry about marriage policy? If marriage policy does matter, why not “broaden the definition” of marriage to promote family values? How would recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages harm marriage? Isn’t ours a losing cause, or at best a secondary one? And why privilege anyone’s sectarian values at all — doesn’t that compromise freedom and equality? https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/338682/marriage-and-politics?utm_source=Copy+of+RTA+Bradley+Paradox+of+Persons&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more