Image by Luke Lawreszuk from Pixabay. December 9th marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, which sought justice against twenty-three physicians and administrators for their crimes against humanity during the Holocaust. In his opening statement for the prosecution, Brigadier General Telford Taylor described “murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed…
Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionismby Timothy Jackson Review by David Blumenthal Books in Protestant constructive theology are not so much expository writing as they are an extended conversation with varied sources on a theological theme. In this book, Timothy Jackson sets forth his theses in a sequence of conversations…
Moses, Jesus, and Einstein and Those Who Hate Them A Contextualizing and Summary of Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism Timothy P. Jackson Moses and Albert Einstein embodied a singular Judaic genius. Both men pointed out the intimate connection between realities typically considered separate if not adversarial, with Einstein doing…
Photo by Ravi Pinisetti on Unsplash. The New Age of Rights In the 1990s, the European Union (EU) seemed to be done. The Old Continent was pacified. Soviet imperialism had melted away. European dictatorships — from Portugal to Spain, from Greece to Romania — had ended. European citizens could travel from Italy to the Netherlands,…
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay Introduction This short posting on what the Jewish tradition has to say about Thanksgiving will strike some as surprising — so a word of background might be helpful. Traditional Jews do not celebrate holidays of another religion and have always shied away from even nominally secular holidays that are…
Photo from Pixabay By the 6th century CE, Christianity was a religion of empire that produced significant codices of imperial law, many of which regulated Jewish practice. Even so, however, Christian polemics against Jewish “legalism” and the perceived burden of the Mosaic-Pharisaic law were commonplace. According to foundational Christian writings, Jesus’s death on the cross…
Image by Darko Stojanovic from Pixabay The question of the “right” to fair, universal and comprehensive healthcare has been circulating for quite a while, but rapid expansion of modern medical technology has transformed the question from a periodic issue into a perennial one. Controlling rising costs, determining priorities, and ensuring fair distribution and access to…
Photo by jessica45 on Pixabay This is the final installment of a three-part essay, offering a radical proposal for how ethical prosecutors ought to approach sentencing recommendations for non-violent criminal offenders, given the often dangerous and abusive conditions that exist in many American prisons. This perspective is informed by Jewish law’s complex history and jurisprudence…
Photo by jessica45 on Pixabay This is the second part of a three-part essay offering a radical proposal for how ethical prosecutors ought to approach sentencing recommendations for non-violent criminal offenders given the often dangerous and abusive conditions that exist in many American prisons. This perspective is informed by Jewish law’s complex history and jurisprudence…
Photo by jessica45 on Pixabay This is the first part of a three-part essay offering a radical proposal for how ethical prosecutors ought to approach sentencing recommendations for non-violent criminal offenders given the often dangerous and abusive conditions that exist in many American prisons. This perspective is informed by Jewish law’s complex history and jurisprudence…