Today is Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks — one of the three big holidays, hagim, when Jews journeyed to Jerusalem to make a sacrifice at the Temple. It was in the first instance an agricultural festival, marked out by biblical injunction as 50 days from the barley harvest at Passover to the wheat harvest.
Why, exactly, is it so difficult to find a burial place for Tamerlan Tsarnaev?
Last Saturday I attended a memorial service in Washington for Henry Riecken, an old friend’s father, who died last December at the age of 95. Riecken was one of the high priests of American social science during its mid-20th-century heyday, but he earned lasting fame as one of the three co-authors of When Prophecy Fails, the classic account of true believers who refuse to give up their beliefs even when faced with definite empirical proof to the contrary.
I am more than sympathetic to the desire of American Muslims to put as much distance as they can between themselves and the Tsarnaev brothers. We Jews know only too well what it is like to be blamed collectively for things we didn’t do, beginning with the crucifixion of Jesus.
GetReligion’s Mollie has been leading the charge (most recently, here) that the mainstream media has provided insufficient coverage of the murder trial of the Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, and as tempests in teapots go, this one has reached Category 4.
You’d never guess it from the media smoke swirling around St. Peter’s these past few weeks, but the consensus is pretty much yes.
That’s the proposition advanced by conservative pundit Mary Eberstadt in her contribution to the Wall Street Journal’s roundup of what-to look-for-in-a-new-pope essays. I have my doubts
Let’s say you’re an American Catholic bishop and you’re thinking about what your people would like to see in the new pope. You’re not really interested in the views of all those nominal Catholics who rarely darken your door. It’s the loyal parishioners, the leaven in the lump, whose opinions you want to know.
Over at RealClearReligion, Jeffrey Weiss thinks the fuss over Tim Tebow’s broken engagement at First Baptist Dallas doesn’t “make a lick of sense.” I beg to differ.
Let the record show that Terry Mattingly has admitted making a mistake. A couple of weeks ago he took the press to task for using the word “resign” to report Pope Benedict’s decision to step down. “Abdicate” was, he claimed, le mot juste. But late last week he allowed as how his shot had been wide [...]
