I just finished teaching my Adult Education class for the year. It was truly fun, truly exhausting. We had eight sessions covering pre-history from the time of Abraham and going through the modern Jewish-American experience. I wrote about 120 pages of notes. We covered about 4000 years.
We started off with definitions of what it has meant to be a Jew and what it means today. There was a lot of Bible discussion, a lot of contemporary archaeolgical works cited. My goal was for a re-examination ...
If your religion does not recognize the Pope as the supreme interpreter of religious doctrine on Earth....always correct and infallible...if you think that you somehow might have the capacity to think for yourself about what G-d might want, then your religion is "wounded." Thus sayeth the Pope Benedict XVI and since he can never be wrong (when speaking Ex Officio) your religion MUST be wounded.
As a disclaimer, I should comment that I am pretty much against the Catholic Church. I have a littl...
“This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt; let all those that are hungry enter and eat thereof; and all who are in distress, come and celebrate the Passover. At present, we celebrate it here, but next year we hope to celebrate in the land of Israel. This year we are servants here, but next year we hope to be free people in the land of Israel."[/B] - Passover Haggadah
At sunset on April 2nd, 2007, the holiday of Passover begins. Usually Passover is said to co...
Kayla Steinberg is one of the students in my JCS 7th Grade class. The following is her own composition and is posted with permission. Pretty remarkable to have been written by a 7th Grader!
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On the first night of Hanukah,
My true love sent to me
A menorah in a pretty blue box.
On the second night of Hanukah,
My true love sent to me
Two chocolate gelts,
And a menorah in a pretty blue box.
On the third night of Hanukah,
My tru...
Joel Hunter is the pastor of the Northland Church, a board member of many Christian organizations, a noteworthy author and scholar. For a brief period of time he was also the President of the Christian Coalition. But he left (or was asked to leave) because he wanted to expand the agenda beyond opposition to gay marriage and abortion, wanting to take on issues like poverty and disease.
"I look forward to … expanding our mission to concern itself with the care of creation, helping society's mar...
Last Saturday, the JCS 7th Grade, students and parents, saved the world. We didn't save the whole thing, but we started with a little piece of it.
I teach Sunday school at the Jewish Cultural School, a Jewish secular institution located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As part of the curriculum, we cover each individual's obligation to serve the community, to perform acts of Tzedakah or charity, and good deeds, or Mitzvot. Each year our class raises money to contribute to worthy causes, such as Ronald...
My headline is a bit of hyperbole, but not too far off target.
In an outdoor Mass before 250,000 in Munich, Germany, His Holiness said that science and rational thought weakens our ability to accept the religious message. "Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God, there are too many frequencies filling our ears. What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited for our age.”
“People in Africa and Asia admire our scientific and technical prowess, but at the same t...
It is amazing to me the amount of debate that there has been regarding the Dan Brown book and movie, when the real conspiracy by the Catholic Church goes seemingly unnoticed. The Catholic Church should be grateful for the Da Vinci Code books and movie because the furor surrounding those fictional events serves as a distraction from the true pattern of sexual abuse and concealment.
In 2004, the Catholic Church in the United States received an internal report placing the substantiated allegat...
Anyone who reads my blog with regularity knows that I teach Sunday school at the Jewish Cultural School, a Jewish secular humanist school and congregation. I teach the 7th Grade, the last year of education before the kids have their B'not Mitzvahs.
As an important part of this education, we study how religion in general, and Judaism in particular, are practiced in other congregations. I take the class on trips to other congregations for first-hand experience. We always begin by observing Sabb...
Every religion has to deal with the issue of Sin (upper-case letter intentional) and Repentance, the recovery, if you will, from Sin to a State of Grace. How each religion deals with it effects how that religion will be received and the degree to which it will be accepted. To me, that is marketing.
Every religion has it's "Do's and Don't's." Do go to church on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Don't kill your neighbor (at least not if he happens to be of the same religion as you, anyway.) If you fail t...
In the Pope's latest book, he refers to gay marriage as part of "a new ideology of evil." In this time of ever-increasing revelations of child sex abuse within the Catholic Church, I stand in wonder of just how misplaced priorities can be.
The book Memory and Identity is based on transcribed conversations between the Pontiff and his circle of friends. The conversations occurred in 1993, before the extent of the sexual abuse of children by priests was widely known or acknowledged. But I am ne...
"Mighty Rome is fallen...."
When last we left this history, the Roman Empire under Constantine had adopted Christianity as the state religion, the Gnostics had been driven underground and the Jews were suffering from intermittent persecutions within the Empire. We should perhaps look at the Roman Empire.
At the height of the Empire, Roman power spanned to the North and South, to the East and West of the Mediterranean Sea. A map of Rome at the height of it's glory can be found at http://www...
We have seen how, after Nicea, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. But what about the Jews?
In 70 AD, after a bitter rebellion, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. The rebellion lasted from 66 AD to 73 AD. According to both Tacitus and Josephus 1.1 million Jews died and 97,000 were sold into slavery. (Personally, I think this figure is over-stated and that Tacitus accepted Josephus as his source. But regardless of the exact numbers, there was a tremendous ...
"Render unto Caesar....."
In 325 AD, a council of bishops was convened at Nicea, in Turkey. The decisions of that council would effect the future of religion in the West for centuries to come.
Constantine had become Emperor in 323 AD, after defeating the Emperor Licinius in battle. Constantine would end the persecutions against the Christians and would, on his deathbed in 337, accept conversion to Christianity becoming the first Christian Roman Emperor. But in 323, he was still a pagan. Ye...
"These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin (Didymos) Judas Thomas wrote down (recorded.)"
These are the opening words of the Gospel of Thomas, first discovered in the 1890's and also included in the documents that comprise the collection known as the Gnostic Gospels.
It begins in the desert. It always begins in the desert.
The year is 1945. An Arab named Muhammed Ali al-Samman and his brothers had gone to collect sabakh, a soft soil used to fertilize c...