Reproductive technology offers a bewildering number of options for infertile men and women to have children, including ovary and testis freezing, transplantation, in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor sperm, donor eggs, stem cells, gestational surrogacy, genetic diagnosis of embryos, and, of course, birth control. These technologies cut to the very core of personal and religious belief systems. T...

In 1996 I wrote an essay on Jewish-Christian relations entitled “What Has 2000 to Do with 5760?,” in which I expressed concern over the possible effect that the passage of 2000 might have on the exceptional period of philo-Judaism that has marked Western society from the end of the Holocaust until the present. Indeed, the last 60 years may well mark the most exceptional and sustained period of ...

As China is the only country in the Far East world in which Jews have continually lived for over 1,000 years, "Chinese Judaism" -referring to the religious belief and practices of those Jews who had lived or are now living in China -is unique. Within this long history, a significant distinction must be made. Jews who came before modern times, before 1840, became part of Chinese society almost w...

Marriage holds a special position in different cultures and religions. Despite differences in the limits and conditions of marriage, religions have many similarities in regard to the issue of marriage. This research paper is a comparative study of marriage in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The findings reveal that all three traditions recognize marriage to have a sacred nature, and they all ...

A commercial medium often assumed to exist solely for a juvenile and "lowbrow" audience, comic books have been largely ignored by academic scholarship. There are some exceptions within the fields of American studies-for instance, the work of Thomas Inge-popular culture studies, where writers gather in a Comic Arts subdivision of the Popular Culture Association, and cultural studies, with work b...

Introduction: Rabbinic Sacramentalism? It is no news to announce that in rabbinic Judaism learning and study are holy, even sanctifying activities. But what is gained by asserting, as I do in the title of this essay, that aspects of classical rabbinic learning, particularly its insistence on the oral mastery of textual material, are usefully described as not merely 'sanctifying' but 'sacramenta...

• Evidence of effectiveness: This intervention has been evaluated in six well-conducted randomized controlled trials, and found to produce a sizable increase in the quit rate: 13.9% of women assigned to the intervention quit smoking in the last 4-5 months of their pregnancy, compared with 8.3% of the women assigned to the control group. In almost all cases, these effects were statistically-sign...

Religion and theology are central ways that many people make sense of the world and their own place in that world. But the insights of critical studies of religion, or what is sometimes positioned as religious studies as opposed to theology, are scarce in disability literature. This article suggests some of the costs of this oversight and some of the benefits of including religion. First, this ...