Recent Posts

  • Moed Katan 19

    The mishnah at the bottom of yesterday’s daf listed a number of texts that one is forbidden to write on hol hamoed: Torah scrolls, tefillin andmezuzahs. The presumption is that whoever is writing these texts is doing so in order to sell them, and we’ve seen already that commerce is

  • St. Thomas Aquinas and the Fittingness of the Democratic Order

    One of the great political fights in medieval Christendom affected St. Thomas Aquinas’s own studies as a youngster. A fortuitous military conflict between Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX spilling into the abbey of Monte Cassino, where Aquinas was doing his elementary studies, led to his parents sending him

  • Colonialism in glass houses

    By Rob Renfroe Covid vaccination for United Methodists in the United States is an issue of choice – not of convenience. Inoculation availability in the U.S. is widespread and accessible. This is not the case for all United Methodists in other countries. While it can be hard for urban and

  • Why Latter-day Saints Cannot Disregard the Old Testament

    Beginning in January, the worldwide Sunday School and home Sunday curriculum for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—“Come, Follow Me”—turned to the Hebrew Bible or, as Latter-day Saints and other Christians typically refer to it, the Old Testament. Why? Why bother? Isn’t the Hebrew Bible sometimes difficult to

  • Moed Katan 17

    Can we separate an artist from their art? A scholar from their scholarship? Can we appreciate a wonderful book written by a terrible person? These are some of the deeply painful questions we ask today, especially in the age of #MeToo and cancel culture, and the seemingly never-ending revelations of