At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the population was two per square world. — Israel Shenker Copy Share Image
Theology emerged not as a course of knowledge but as a feast of homily and imagination and exaggeration in which every man could find… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
Embracing and rejecting tradition, bound and liberated by faith, torn between obscurantism and reason, self-assured and self-critical, they were a kaleidoscope of fragments, positions… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored. — Israel Shenker Copy Share
One rabbi compared wise men studying the law to children tossing a ball to one another: a first sage said the meaning was this,… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
In the Bible, fate was often presented as the handmaiden of morality: sin was succeeded by misfortune, righteousness by prosperity, with reward and punishment… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
It was God who dictated what man should believe and do, leaving man the freedom to accept or scoff, to obey or disregard. — Israel Shenker Copy Share
The [Jewish] Sabbath was not intended to be simply a desert of prohibitions, but rather an oasis for moral restoration and seemly pleasure-one was… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
The suggestion that Jews were selected from among all nations of the earth to be God's chosen people suggested a kind of group arrogance,… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
Jews are a singular confusion — difficult to define, awkward to describe, impossible to understand. All the virtues, all the vices, every pleasure, every… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
In Jewish tradition, death-defying devotion to scholarship was the stuff of saintliness. — Israel Shenker Copy Share
A [Jewish] woman could not divorce her husband, but she could petition for divorce, and the religious courts could force him to grant the… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a passerby, next… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
A second-century rabbi said that if 999 angels gave a bad account of a man and one angel reported favorably, God would hear the… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
Fundamentalists are less concerned to be systematic and rational than to be humble and faithful, accepting God's commandments because they come from God, not… — Israel Shenker Copy Share
