Tense Times with Protesters in a Brooklyn Hot Zone

As New Yorkers brace for a second surge, Orthodox communities that resist public health directives, and the NYPD, lead the way

----- On the morning of October 7, I discovered that Marine Park, the neighborhood in deepest Brooklyn where I live, is in the red zone of neighborhoods experiencing alarming increases in the number of positive COVID-19 tests. While the rest of New York state has a positive test rate of 1.2%, the ...
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Tense Times with Protesters in a Brooklyn Hot Zone

A Spiritual Month in the Cloud

Virtual Seder, makeshift matzoh, and finding joy amidst grief

The Cloud this April hums with virtual Seders, virtual Easters, virtual gatherings for the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Jews world over subtract from their full glass of wine the ritual drops signifying the ten plagues suffered by the Egyptians when they would not release us from servitude. Dom: water becomes blood Tzfardeyah: frogs overrun ...
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A Spiritual Month in the Cloud

The Christian and the Cosmos

The Puritan’s Grand Tour

Horace Bushnell needed a vacation. On the first day of July 1845, the Hartford, Conn., clergyman boarded the British packet-ship Victoria and set off for a salaried year in Europe. Weary from preaching trips to New York City, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, and Ohio, along with the publication of a prolific number of tracts, ...
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The Christian and the Cosmos