January 6, 2022
There’s an interesting debate raging through the imperiled halls of the Ivy League’s humanities departments -- and it has special meaning for Modern Orthodoxy as a religious community that has classically valued the encounter with worldly, humanistic wisdom. As the relationship of those two realms of wisdom, often framed around the concept of Torah u-Madda, is receiving renewed ideological and institutional reassessment, TRADITION's editor Jeffrey Saks takes note of trends in general higher education and society. This column is the first in a projected series exploring this topic and its importance in the coming months.
December 30, 2021
Sarah Golubtchik finds in Eric Bazilian’s song “One of Us” a positive theological exercise with potential to deeply impact the development of one’s religious persona.
December 23, 2021
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is an enduring and eloquent examination of that most American of virtues: individualism. Since the essential human being is the private self, how do we square the essay's teachings with a religious life of community and contribution to the other? Jeffrey Saks re-reads “Self-Reliance,” with its echoes in the Rav and the Reb, in this week’s The BEST.
December 16, 2021
Carol Gilligan’s "In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development" changed the way moral theory and psychology recognize different voices. Stephen Glicksman explains why this matters to everyone – and uses Gilligan's work to underline the various implications of the role of women in Jewish thought and communal life – in this week’s “The BEST.”