Secularism
Biblical PoliticsTuesday, October 23, 2012 by Alan Mittleman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Michael Walzer is a pivotal figure in the recovery of the Jewish political tradition. From his early book, Exodus and Revolution, which traced the impact of the Exodus story on Western politics, through his editorship, with Israeli colleagues, of the projected four-volume Jewish Political Tradition, Walzer is almost unrivalled as a scholar of Jewish political thought.
One-Step EthicsWednesday, October 17, 2012 by Gil Student | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
For 13 years in the New York Times Magazine, Randy Cohen’s weekly column, “The Ethicist,” posed and answered ethical questions from readers. I turned to the book for a summation of his ethical sensibility—and found evidence of both his decency and the limits of his secular approach, which in turn highlight a danger society currently faces.
Editors' Picks
Prophetic Democracy Warren Zev Harvey, Jewish Ideas and Ideals. Equality of all Israel’s citizens "is not a grudging compromise that Judaism has made with modern secular ideologies, but derives from within Judaism—from the vision of the Prophets."
E Pluribus Unum? Ashley Rogers Berner, First Things. The United States requires all publicly funded schools to be secular, but several European governments provide public funding to religious schools. Which model is better?
Erdoğan's Ottoman Ambitions Emanuele Ottolenghi, Standpoint. Turkey's Islamist prime minister seems bent on resurrecting the Ottoman Empire. First, though, he will have to eradicate secularism and nationalism at home.
Samson the Suicide Bomber? Neil Forsyth, Times Literary Supplement. Milton's Samson Agonistes turns the strongman’s revenge against the Philistines into a holy crusade. Does that make it an act of terror?
The Forgotten Firebrand Sue Vice, H-Net. Appalled at the secularism of inter-war Anglo-Jewry, poet Izak Goller bemoaned “the gods of the shops and the warehouses / Hollow papier-mâché imitations of the Golden Calf of our ancestors!”