Human Trustees

I would not have written this post had I not been part of a foursome virtual book club. One of these friends from my 1970s seminary days in the Boston area had been reading a book by award-winning author specialized in early American history (four awards, including being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize): Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Eye of…

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese became a Jesuit priest in 1964 after earning a PhD political science at UC Berkeley, but he has mostly served as a journalist and academic. I find his pieces in Religious News Service consistently informing and thought provoking—including this one from a couple of months ago, “Amos, a prophet for social justice, is a prophet…

I end this series of eight posts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the prospects of ending it by framing the issue theologically. I am a Christian theologian, after all, and I spent my second career researching and writing about Muslim-Christian dialogue. And since the first and greater part of the Bible is the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, and…

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), an international news agency going back to 1917 with stellar journalistic credentials, ran an article in mid-August 2025 with the title, “Jew vs Jew rhetoric breaks hearts in a bitter internal debate about the Gaza war.” In it, Andrew Silow-Carroll argues that almost two years into this Gaza war, “the Jewish conversation has shifted”: “Jews…