Then and Now
Have gum disease? Boils? Abscesses? Anal sores? An ear ache? A swollen eye? Insect stings? Check out the Bavli for a remedy. The Babylonian Talmud is full of medical advice. Enough advice, in fact, for Julius Preuss to fill a fat tome entitled … [Continue reading] about Medicine and the Redaction of the Talmud
The humanities, we are now regularly told, are in crisis. In colleges, enrollment in humanities courses has decreased as students flock to more "relevant" courses and majors. Academic administrators, in turn, redirect resources to the areas that … [Continue reading] about Musings on the Humanities
Most scholars today believe that there is no concept of "homosexuality," as we usually understand the term, in the Bible. That is, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although clearly familiar with homoerotic sexual acts, do not know of the … [Continue reading] about Paul, Homosexuality, and Midrash
Seventeen years ago, with the birth of the internet, we entered what historians are calling the “fourth information age.” Yet, as Cathy Davidson notes, we in the academy are still very much part of the “third information age,” which began in the … [Continue reading] about Digital Humanities Now
Several years ago I wrote an article, “‘And on the Earth You Shall Sleep’”: Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Asceticism” (Journal of Religion 83 [2003]: 204-225). In that article, I compared rabbinic “asceticism” (which I broadly define as a set of … [Continue reading] about The Self and Science