Religious Heresy, Liberalism, and Political Philosophy

By not knowing, the recent positions taken by political philosophers over the nature of justice repeat, but superficially so, those much earlier theological arguments over sin and free will.

Scholarship, Truth, and Islam

What Bevilacqua describes as “the Republic of Arabic letters” was the emergence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a number of European scholars who, although Christian, championed Islam as a worthwhile subject of investigation.

The Resurrection of a Language and the Language of Resurrection

Lewis Glinert observes that “an Israeli teenager today can open a three-thousand-year-old chapter of biblical prose and understand it almost unaided… By contrast, no English speaker today could open a one-thousand-year-old ‘English’ text and make sense of it unaided; it’s another tongue.”

What a Nation Isn’t

Recognizing the distinction between unity and uniformity—between, on the one hand, a national unity made up of divergent traditions and, on the other, an unrealistic national uniformity that is rarely manifested except during brief, unsustainable periods of patriotic enthusiasm—is an elementary prerequisite for cultural history and analysis.

Hebraism in Religion, History, and Politics