Last month, as it became clear that Cardinal Bergoglio would likely be elected Pope, his friend Brazilian Cardinal Claudio hugged him and gave him a message. “He said don’t forget about the poor,” Pope Francis explained at a Vatican press conference. “And that’s how in my heart came the name Francis of Assisi.” Francis of […]
Francis J. Bremer, author of the recently published biography, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds, discusses the fervent Puritan world of religious politics that led to the founding of the New Haven Colony, as today we celebrate John Davenport’s 416th birthday, and the 375th anniversary of New Haven for the month […]
How did the historical, concrete Jesus become known as the Christ, the Son of God? How did the idea of this man develop? Forty years after he first entered the “Jesus field,” lauded academic Geza Vermes gives a narrative of that expansion from the embodied Jesus to the belief in his divinity that founded a […]
Fania Oz-Salzberger— Jews and Words tells a story, and grinds a few axes, on two of our favourite perennial themes: How did the Jews remain Jews? and, How can books keep families and generations together? We offer our readers a hard yet playful look at our own Jewish identity, as a father and daughter, novelist and historian. We […]
What does it mean for a Muslim woman to wear a veil? What is the role of women in Islam? What is the relationship between culture and faith? Leila Ahmed, an author and professor at Harvard Divinity School, investigates these topics most recently in A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to […]
The Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog group that monitors religious freedom and public education, commissioned Mark Chancey, an associate professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, to produce a report on the implementation of a 2007 that required school districts to incorporate the study of the Bible’s influence on history and literature into their […]
Susan Jacoby, author of the new biography, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, here reflects on the significance of Ingersoll as a religious and philosophical thinker, considering women’s and human rights in nineteenth-century America and arguing that he was a man well ahead his times—more like twentieth-century feminists than his own contemporaries on the […]
Listen to the podcast interview for Jews and Words on iTunes! Below you will find an excerpt from Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and Words, an exploration of the role of the written word in Jewish culture within the topics of continuity, women, timelessness and individualism. Amos Oz & Fania Oz-Salzberger— Another closely related […]
Listen to the podcast interview for Jews and Words on iTunes! Below you will find an excerpt from Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and Words, an exploration of the role of the written word in Jewish culture within the topics of continuity, women, timelessness and individualism. Amos Oz & Fania Oz-Salzberger— “Why is […]
Francis J. Bremer, author of the recently published biography, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds, continues his discussion of the intertwined religious and political histories of Boston, the first founders—its clergy, and their importance to our historical understanding. Francis J. Bremer— When I was a young man – long before I […]
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