Raphael Grunfeld is a New York attorney and Jewish scholar who can explain Jewish philosophy and religious thought regarding suffering.

Stewart Shapiro is O’Donnell Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. In his essay “Faith and Reason, the Perpetual War: Ruminations of a Fool” (included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life), he discusses growing up in a Jewish home and his fondness for the faith’s traditions and the intellectual aspects of […]

Edwin Curley is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has argued that the commands and permissions that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures attribute to God make it incredible that the morally perfect being of Christian theology […]

Greg Epstein serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and is the author of Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe (2009). He holds master’s degrees in Judaic studies and theological studies and has been ordained as a humanist rabbi. The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard is “dedicated to building, educating, and nurturing a diverse community of […]

What are some helpful hints on covering highly charged religious services, especially ones that seem to defy rational explanation? By Sandi Dolbee The San Diego Union-Tribune* You walk into the room and the first things you hear are the sounds. People mumbling and wailing, speaking in languages you simply don’t recognize. Others are falling down, […]

The work of the Sage-ing Guild is inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, co-author of From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older (Warner, 1995). A leader in the Jewish renewal movement, Schachter-Shalomi developed an influential model of late-life spiritual growth that the Sage-ing Guild is now promoting.

Jewish Funds for Justice works for economic justice, including affordable housing. Its national Tzedec program increases home ownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods by pooling low- and no-interest loans from Jewish philanthropists and reinvesting them in community development financial institutions. It has organized millions of dollars in real estate projects across the country and has offices in New […]

Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer leads the Community Shul of Montecito and Santa Barbara, Calif. He has spoken out about the problem of rabbinical burnout.

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, professor of history at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., writes about 1960s black activism and about black-Jewish relations, including Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton University Press, 2006).