Two years ago at this time New York city was paralyzed by a blizzard; thankfully, I was visiting family outside the city when the snow fell and was able to hole up in my house upstate where I teach at Bard College. There was plenty of snow up there, but around Bard people know how […]

About the same time, in early December 2012, that the media went into high gear discussing the putatively catastrophic consequences of a “fiscal cliff” on January 1, 2013, they also reported quite extensively about another looming date, that one a little earlier, on December 21, 2012, when according to some calculations the so-called Long Count […]

“Your first time in a political campaign?” the Senator said. “You poor bastard.” He had his sympathy, however, firmly under control. And properly so, since professors of politics – Woodrow Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan aside – rarely take the knocks associated with the subject they study. The Senator probably considered, and rightly, some bruises, […]

Back in the beginning of the Christmas season, I wrote about the way the gospel Christmas narratives “roll the credits” by giving genealogical tables that link Jesus to Jewish history. In contemplating Christmas, we should never forget that the first Christmas was first and foremost a Jewish event. Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the […]

It’s one thing to be a Jew on Christmas in a majority-Christian land like the United States, a meme made famous (infamous?) by recent cultural creations stretching all the way from Adam Sandler to South Park. But it’s another to be a Jew on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. That meme isn’t famous […]

Now it gets tough. Yesterday’s post looked at what divides Christians and other theists from atheists; today we cut deeper and look at what separates Christians from believers in other religions.And the truth is that nothing separates Christianity from other religions like Christmas. That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in […]

Iranian authorities have realized that their longtime ally in Syria is on the way out and have held talks with members of the opposition about a transitional regime, reports the Los Angeles Times. From the piece (with excellent reporting from Ramin Mostaghim and Alexandra Sandels) it appears that Iran’s government is still not willing to […]

Yesterday I posted an essay about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life. Life, we feel, amounts to more than eating and scratching our […]

Five go-old rings!Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2012-13 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6.Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a […]

Yesterday, we looked at why the gospels make such a point of saying that Jesus was born of a virgin.  But there is more to the story than the absence of a biological father. What kind of home was Jesus born into? Who were Mary and Joseph, this couple who go to Bethlehem, can’t get […]