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"Luke Ford reports all of the 'juicy' quotes, and has been doing it for years." (Marc B. Shapiro)
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff) LATEST POSTS:
- Dennis Prager v Cedars-Sinai Lawsuit
- Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
- What is a ‘Received Idea’?
- Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality
- Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Iran War
- Marine Le Pen
- The Coalition-Proximity Rule
- Nigel Farage
- Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun
- Walker Connor (1926-2017)
- Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination
- Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer
- Ernest Gellner
- Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible
- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
- Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist
- California Historian Kevin Starr
- Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power
- William T. Vollmann: An American Life in Excess
- Rod Dreher: A Life in Exile
BEST POSTS:
- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
* The City of Private Rooms (5-25-26)
Category Archives: Bible
The Jewish Jesus and His Interpreters: Amy-Jill Levine and the Return of the New Testament to Second Temple Judaism
Amy-Jill Levine (b. 1956) is an American biblical scholar who has reshaped how readers situate Jesus, Paul, and the first followers of Jesus inside the diverse Jewish world of the Second Temple period rather than inside the categories of later … Continue reading
Posted in Amy Jill-Levine, Bible
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When the Tacit Cannot Stay Tacit: Turner, Shapiro, and the Crisis of Mosaic Authorship
Maimonides’ Principle 8 is an essentialist articulation imposed on a tradition whose operations were tacit. Stephen Turner’s framework, which attacks essentialism in social theory and treats tacit knowledge claims with skepticism, lets us see the move Maimonides made and the … Continue reading
Posted in Bible, Marc B. Shapiro
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The Boundary at Sinai: Principle 8 as Coalition Technology
Principle eight is the live wire of Orthodox theology today, and Shapiro’s chapter on it is the most explosive in his 2011 book, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised. The Principle holds three claims at once. The … Continue reading
Posted in Alliance Theory, Bible, Marc B. Shapiro
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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Danielic Prophetic Authority
Interpreters of the Book of Daniel in the Western tradition do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as fidelity to the visions, loyalty to the prophetic timeline, … Continue reading
Posted in Bible
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Decoding Bible Scholar Bart Ehrman
Per Alliance Theory: Bart Ehrman functions as a high-status defector who provides “cognitive insurance” for those leaving the evangelical alliance. In David Pinsof’s framework, a defector is most valuable when they retain the specialized knowledge of the group they left. … Continue reading
Posted in Bible, Christianity
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Decoding Jewish New Testament Scholar Amy Jill-Levine
Per Alliance Theory: Amy-Jill Levine functions as a high-status neutral arbiter who manages the inflation of moral threats between competing religious coalitions. According to the framework of David Pinsof, humans use moral language and scholarship to coordinate alliances and attack … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Amy Jill-Levine, Anti-Semitism, Bible, Christianity, Judaism
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Decoding Rabbi Joshua Berman
Per Alliance Theory: Joshua Berman occupies a rare mediator position between Orthodox commitment and academic biblical studies. In Alliance Theory terms, he is a boundary translator trying to keep two uneasy coalitions in limited cooperation. Start with the problem he … Continue reading
Posted in Alliance Theory, Bible
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The Different Ways Fundamentalist Jews & Christians Struggle With Modernity
Fundamentalist Christians navigate the same alliance pressures as the Haredi world. Both groups face a modern world that claims jurisdiction over their sacred texts. However, their strategies for managing epistemic defeat differ based on their relationship to the Bible and … Continue reading
Posted in Bible, Christianity, Haredi, Hasidim
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Decoding Bible Scholar Richard Elliott Friedman
Per Alliance Theory: Richard Elliott Friedman treats the Torah as the physical record of a series of ancient political mergers. He argues that the Pentateuch is not a single voice but a library of competing visions that were forced together … Continue reading
Posted in Alliance Theory, Bible
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Decoding Jacob Milgrom
Jacob Milgrom was a scholar of the priestly tradition. He moved the study of Leviticus from the periphery of biblical scholarship to the center of ethical inquiry. His work challenges the older view that priestly law consists of dry, mechanical … Continue reading
Posted in Bible, Leviticus, R. Jacob Milgrom
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