Jews and Judaism

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Plug-In: Prayers for Maui -- houses of worship burned, then people of faith arrived to help

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Plug-In: Prayers for Maui -- houses of worship burned, then people of faith arrived to help

All of us have been watching news of the devastating wildfires in Hawaii.

That’s where we start our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith.

What To Know: The Big Story

Wildfires’ human toll: At least 55 people are dead in Hawaii’s worst natural disaster, and that number will likely rise as search and rescue operations continue, The Associated Press reports.

President Joe Biden, Pope Francis and other prominent leaders and ordinary people around the world are offering prayers.

Up in flames: The fires leveled the historic town of Lahaina on Maui, destroying cultural landmarks, according to ABC News.

Those landmarks include the Waiola Church, the first Christian church on Maui; and the Baldwin Home, its oldest house, which served as a missionary compound around 1834.

A Buddhist temple also is among the sites feared lost or damaged, as are Episcopal and Methodist churches.

USA Today’s Terry Collins shares these heartbreaking reflections from a leader of the Waiola church:

It took just two words for Judy Kinser to describe her beloved historic church on the island of Maui, which just celebrated its 200th anniversary three months ago.

"Destroyed. Devastating," Kinser, treasurer and office administrator at Waiola Church in Lahaina, Hawaii, said Wednesday. "Not sure if the church building and preschool buildings (are) also gone."

As word and images of the wildfires began spreading across the town of Lahaina, longtime member Anela Rosa, the church's lay minister of 13 years, tearfully confirmed the worst.

"It's gone, the social hall, the sanctuary, the annex, all of it," Rosa told USA TODAY Wednesday. "It is totally unimaginable."

Relief efforts: As always after disasters, faith-based organizations are mobilizing help.


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Complicated question in the news: What do Jews believe about the death penalty?

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Complicated question in the news: What do Jews believe about the death penalty?

QUESTION:

What do Jews believe about the death penalty?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

There was relief last week when a unanimous Pittsburgh jury approved the death penalty for the man (not to be dignified here with a name) who in 2018 massacred 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life Congregation, in the deadliest act of anti-Jewish violence in U.S. history.

There’s a strong aversion to capital punishment in the teaching across the branches of Judaism but, as we’ll see, this is not absolute, and Judaism’s biblical and textual tradition on this is complex.

There were mixed feelings in Pittsburgh’s historically close-knit Jewish community. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that capital punishment “was the preference of some but not all of the victim’ families” and “some local Jews openly opposed” execution. The New Light Congregation, which also worships in the Tree of Life building, said “many of our members prefer that the shooter spend the rest of his life in prison” and question feelings of “vengeance or revenge against him.”

As appeals grind away, presumably for years, the antisemitic murderer will join the 41 inmates awaiting execution at the federal prison system’s death row or “Special Confinement Unit” in Terre Haute, Indiana, which was established when Congress reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press says the morality and practicality of capital punishment could become a big issue in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign for the first time since 1988. Republican front-runners Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are both making execution central to their anti-crime messages.

And the opposite. Liberal Democrats are vexed that President Joe Biden pledged in 2020 to abolish the death penalty in federal statutes but has not done so. However, his Department of Justice currently has a moratorium in place while it conducts a thorough examination of problems with methods of killing and racial unfairness in judicial application.

Consideration of Jewish belief begins at the beginning.


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Plug-In: Justice in the Tree Of Life synagogue shooting -- will killer be executed?

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Plug-In: Justice in the Tree Of Life synagogue shooting -- will killer be executed?

I’m back in Oklahoma after spending big chunks of the last week in California and Texas.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with the killer’s sentence in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

What To Know: The Big Story

Antisemitic attack: “The man who killed 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue was formally sentenced to death Thursday, one day after a jury determined that capital punishment was appropriate for the perpetrator of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.”

That’s the lede from The Associated Press’ Peter Smith (a religion writer who has covered this case from the beginning) and Michael Rubinkam.

Painful process: Survivors characterized Robert Bowers’ trial as extremely difficult to endure and a necessary accounting, according to the New York Times’ Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Anna Betts and Jon Moss. The Times:

“Most families of the victims have said that they supported a death sentence, but some have been outspoken in their opposition to it. One, Miri Rabinowitz, whose husband was killed, said executing the gunman would be a “bitter irony” because her husband had been devoted to “the sanctity of life.”

What’s next: But a big question remains: When will Bowers be put to death?

An even bigger question: Will he actually be executed?

As Religion New Service’s Yonat Shimron points out, “it will take years and likely decades for the sentence to be carried out, if it happens at all.” RNS explains:

Bowers will join 41 others on federal death row. Sixteen people have been executed by the federal government since Congress reinstated capital punishment in 1988.


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Thinking about religion in Russia: Orthodox Christianity has declined, but also grown?

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Thinking about religion in Russia: Orthodox Christianity has declined, but also grown?

“Religion” is a complicated word, as I have noted many times at GetReligion.

Put the word “Byzantine” in front of “religion” or “Christianity” and things get really complicated, as in this secondary definition of that adjective: “ … excessively complicated, and typically involving a great deal of administrative detail.”

Frame Byzantine Christianity with the history of Russian culture and the complications are compounded. Toss in centuries of history — complex, bloody, mysterious and sacred — shared by the Slavic giants Russia and Ukraine and, well, you get the picture.

This weekend “think piece” comes from the Orthodox Christianity news website. This is an information source that, from the American point of view, is extremely conservative. This doesn’t mean that mainstream journalists should ignore it.

Why is that? Because it consistently offers direct links to online sources — documents, speeches, quotable analysis — that the vast majority of reporters and editors would not know about otherwise. This includes, for example, lots of material representing the leadership of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. That’s the historic church of Ukraine that is current caught up — along with millions of its Ukrainian members — in a violent collision between the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s current government, which is backed by the United States, the European Union and the tiny, but symbolic, Orthodox church in Istanbul led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.

It’s easy, these days, for journalists to get government approved material from Moscow and Kyiv. The ancient Orthodox church being crushed by the two armies? Not so much. Thus, it helps to follow the Orthodox Christianity feed on X (the digital platform previously known as Twitter).

Consider the complex realities represented in this recent post: “Percentage of Orthodox is Down in Russia, but Percentage of Practicing Orthodox is up — Survey.” Read this carefully:

According to a new survey from the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center, the overall percentage of Orthodox Christians has decreased in Russia in recent years, while the percentage of those who actively practice the faith is up.


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Plug-In: More Moore on values voters and what appears to be a permanent Trump effect

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Plug-In: More Moore on values voters and what appears to be a permanent Trump effect

Among the week’s intriguing headlines: Pope Francis is hurrying to bolster his progressive legacy as his health problems increase, the Wall Street Journal’s Francis X. Rocca reports.

In Israel, the political rise of ultra-Orthodox Jews is shaking the nation’s sense of identity, the WSJ’s Dov Lieber and Shayndi Raice note. A related major vote is expected as soon as Sunday.

In the U.S., a crowded field of GOP presidential candidates is vying for the Christian Zionist vote as Israel’s rightward shift spurs protests, according to The Associated Press’ Tiffany Stanley.

Also, “the Robert F. Kennedy boomlet is over,” Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin opines. Before it ended (or not, since he isn’t that interested in mainstream press views), the Democratic presidential candidate gave an exclusive, nearly 40-minute interview to Jewish News Syndicate’s Menachem Wecker.

The King’s College in New York is canceling fall classes and laying off faculty but insists it’s not closing, as Emily Belz at Christianity Today and Meagan Saliashvili at Religion News Service explain.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with former President Donald Trump’s lingering hold on right-wing voters.

What To Know: The Big Story

More of the same: “One of former President Donald Trump’s most steadfast evangelical critics said he expects Trump to be the Republican nominee in 2024, and that the years since Trump’s election in 2016 have been an ‘apocalypse.’”

“There’s a wide-open choice, and still you have a majority in the Republican primary behind Trump,” Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore tells Yahoo News’ Jon Ward. “I would be shocked if he’s not the Republican nominee.” Moore has a new book, ”Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America,” which releases July 25.


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Forget about Hollywood for a moment: Where is the biblical Mount Sinai located?

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Forget about Hollywood for a moment: Where is the biblical Mount Sinai located?

QUESTION:

Where is biblical Mount Sinai located?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Why would anyone wonder about the sacred spot where God through Moses revealed the Ten Commandments and other biblical laws? Just look at the name. Doesn’t everybody know that Mount Sinai must of course be on the Sinai Peninsula and, specifically, at a long-venerated location there?

And yet a New York Times feature on June 25 reported that since Saudi Arabia opened up to tourists in 2019, some U.S. Christians have regularly traveled to the nation’s northwestern corner east of the Gulf of Aqaba and south of Jordan, to view what they insist is the true location – oddly enough, within Islam’s founding nation!

As the Times reported, the Arabia claim has been promoted by evangelical Christian tour guides, adventurers and treasure-hunters through popular books, Internet articles and videos. But there’s far more to it. Well-credentialed scholars of the Bible and ancient history in the Near East have proposed this location, which has been gaining ground in recent decades.

At least 13 locations for Mount Sinai (also called Mount Horeb in the Bible) have been proposed, according to the 1993 commentary on the Book of Exodus by Sweden’s Goran Larsson. Jewish tradition never preserved the identity of any location. In fact, Christians are far more interested in the question than Jews, who are more focused on historic sites in the Holy Land. Israeli skeptics and secularists even doubt the entire story about Moses and God’s giving of the Torah.

An article like this can only sketch a vigorous and highly complex debate, so interested readers are invited to explore the matter, starting with resources listed below.

To begin, it’s worth considering a proposed Mount Sinai location within present-day Israel in the southwestern sector of the arid southern wilderness known as the Negev.


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Plug-In: Updates on faith angles in America's post-Roe cultural landscape

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Plug-In: Updates on faith angles in America's post-Roe cultural landscape

Since the most recent Plug-In edition, the gunman in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre that killed 11 Jewish congregants was found guilty, as The Associated Press’ Peter Smith reports.

Pittsburgh’s Jewish community came together after last Friday’s conviction, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Megan Guza. Next up is the death penalty phase of Robert Bowers’ trial, which could take six weeks.

In other news, close to 1.5 million foreigners have arrived in Saudi Arabia for Islam’s annual Hajj pilgrimage, the first without the restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with Saturday’s one-year anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

What To Know: The Big Story

Post-Roe America: On June 24, 2022, federal protections for abortion that had been in place nearly 50 years came to an end.

Such was the result of the high court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

A year after Roe’s fall, 25 million women live in states with abortion bans or tighter restrictions, AP’s Geoff Mulvihill, Kimberlee Kruesi and Claire Savage report.

People of faith split: At the anniversary, the nation’s religious leaders remain sharply divided over abortion, as AP’s David Crary points out:

In the year since the Supreme Court struck down the nationwide right to abortion, America’s religious leaders and denominations have responded in strikingly diverse ways — some celebrating the state-level bans that have ensued, others angered that a conservative Christian cause has changed the law of the land in ways they consider oppressive.


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Plug-In: Fear and heroism recounted at Tree Of Life Synagogue massacre hearings

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Plug-In: Fear and heroism recounted at Tree Of Life Synagogue massacre hearings

Good morning, Plug-in readers.

Among the news we’re watching: Jehovah’s Witnesses, a global denomination of 8.6 million, are resuming their large conventions for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, as Religion News Service’s Alejandra Molina reports.

Meanwhile, a real longshot has paid off in Las Vegas — aka Sin City, according to Crux’s John Lavenburg:

This temple to secular hedonism, where even the airport has slot machines, and where a 2020 study of the ratio of residents to restaurants found the answer to be the classically diabolical number of 666, became the first new Roman Catholic Archdiocese in America in 19 years.

Whoa, that’s some kind of lede!

This is our weekly roundup of the week’s top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We begin with a long-awaited trial in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

What To Know: The Big Story

Fight for killer’s life: As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s religion editor, Peter Smith was a key part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, which claimed 11 lives.

Now with The Associated Press, Smith is providing must-read coverage of the federal trial in the case that started this week:

Show of defiance: In compelling testimony Wednesday and again on Thursday, survivors recounted the fear they experienced and the heroism they witnessed during the attack. At several moments, Smith noted, witnesses “used the opportunity to educate the jury about their faith — a show of defiance before the man who tried to destroy them and who has expressed little emotion while seated at the defense table.”

Tracking antisemitic threats: The Tree of Life shooting “led to arguably the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to protect Jewish institutions in America.”

In a front-page piece for the New York Times this week, Campbell Robertson details the expansion of “the Secure Community Network, the closest thing to an official security agency for American Jewish institutions.”
Like Smith, Robertson is covering Bowers’ trial, as is the Wall Street Journal’s Kris Maher.


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An important question pastors tend to avoid: 'Is premarital sex always sinful?'

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An important question pastors tend to avoid: 'Is premarital sex always sinful?'

QUESTION:

“Is premarital sex always sinful?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The question above was the headline with an April article by Talley Cross, a “gender and sexuality” blogger with patheos.com. She responded with a cautious “no.”

A “yes” answer is the contrary and familiar doctrine and tradition in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other faiths, and as we’ll see below has lately gotten a degree of backing from surprising places.

That age-old teaching is terribly counter-cultural these days and also subject to critique from within religions. The Gallup Poll says in 2001 a slim 53% majority of Americans thought sex between an unmarried man and woman was morally acceptable, but as of last year the number reached a record 76%. (Adultery got only 9% acceptance.)

In a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, 57% of those who identified as Christians “always” or “sometimes” approved of unwed sex for those in a “committed relationship” without marriage, with fully 79% approval among the non-religious respondents. As for casual sex without any “committed relationship,” 50% of the Christians accepted this “always” or “sometimes and the non-religious did so by 83%.

The influential New York Times (ditto for NPR) has developed an interest in a variant known as “polyamory,” romantic relationships with knowledge and consent among three or more participants, who sometimes take additional partners on the side.


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