Aish, 23 February, 2025. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat makes a powerful case for religious practice and belief — a case which, despite (or perhaps because of) its correctness, contains an internal tension rising almost to the level of self-contradiction[…] Douthat’s first two chapters masterfully show that…
Tag: religion
Hamlet’s Chimera
My Substack, Hamlet’s Chimera, explores paradoxes around religion, philosophy, and culture. Some favorite posts:
A Moonshot for American Judaism: Help Revitalize American Christianity
eJewish Philanthropy, December 29, 2020. You know what the biggest problem is with Jewish engagement efforts? The problem is that we only focus on Jews. I’m not kidding. In this country, if we want to get more Jews to shul, we need to get more Christians to church. To revitalize American Judaism, we need to…
Towards Shared Identities
Originally published in Quillette. November 12, 2020. Excerpts: When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, many Jews in the Russian Empire hoped for a French victory. Napoleon had eliminated barriers to Jewish integration and advancement in France; the Russian regime and its policies, by contrast, were thoroughly infused with anti-Jewish discrimination and hostility. But one prominent…
Just Jew It: Against Giving Reasons for Living a Jewish Life
eJewish Philanthropy. July 23, 2019. It’s not uncommon, in Jewish communal circles, to hear it claimed that the central question for our profession today is, “Why be Jewish?” In an age of free choice and self-constructed identities, this argument goes, the Jewish community can no longer count on individuals to affiliate themselves and participate, so…
Religious ‘neutrality’ is a myth.
LA Times. December 23 (online) / December 25 (print), 2016 In 2003, at age 21, I wrote an op-ed for my hometown paper arguing that the Montpelier, Vt., City Hall should remove its Christmas tree. I argued that Christmas decorations symbolically told Jews like me, and other non-Christians, that city government stood more for the…
The Tension of Faith: Why I Appreciate Christians Who Believe I’m Going to Hell
On Being. Apr 10, 2016. He didn’t want this conversation, and he hadn’t started it. Neil and I had been friends and college classmates for about a year. He was a religious Christian, and I a secular Jew, but he never preached to me. Out of nowhere, I asked him whether he thought I was going…
The Next Pope and the Jews
First Things. (March 11, 2013.) When the next pope is elected, pronouncements from major Jewish organizations will follow this basic script: Mazel tov. Your recent predecessors did many good things for the Jews; please expand them. Your predecessors also did many bad things for the Jews; please admit this and do better. Mazel tov again,…
Can’t Buy Me Judaism
eJewish Philanthropy. (August 2012.) “The day is not far off,” wrote John Meynard Keynes, “when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation…
Ma’alot Tsedaqah and Ordine Caritatis: Orders of Charitable Priority in Maimonides and Aquinas
Journal of Ecumenical Studies. (Spring 2012.) In the context of works that would become profoundly influential to each scholar’s respective religious tradition, both Moses Maimonides (in his Mishneh Torah) and Thomas Aquinas (in his Summa Theologiae) formulated orders of priority for charitable giving. Similarities and differences between these formulations illuminate broader similarities and differences between Jewish…
Seth Chalmer 