Clinton and the Middle East: Decision Making and the New Administration
Changing Attitudes of the Israeli Political Leadership Toward the Use of Force
The Renewed Jewish Community of Spain
The Islamic Jihad: The Imperative of Holy War
The Islamic Jihad: The Imperative of Holy War
The Islamic Jihad is one of the most complex and dangerous of the Arab terrorist organizations, with cells in many Middle Eastern countries and, apparently, in Europe as well. These groups generally act on their own initiative without coordination, sometimes even within the same country. All these groups share a fundamentalist Islamic ideology which espouses holy war (jihad) against the infidels, and which is under the powerful ideological-religious influence of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
Turkey, Israel and the Peace Process
Privatization After the Death of Socialism: Lessons for Israel
The Possibilities and Limits of Intercultural Learning: A University Course on African American/Jewish Relations
The Canadian Conundrum: Two Concepts of Nationhood
Yitzhak Shamir and the Changing of the Guard
How Fares the Intifada? Assessing the New Mood.
The Changing Fortunes of Baltic Jewry
The Idea of Christianity in Hobbes’s Leviathan
This essay expounds Hobbes’s idea of Christianity based on a reading of Leviathan as a whole. Among the conclusions are these: First, that Hobbes was profoundly concerned with the religious questions spawned by the Reformation from start to finish in Leviathan, and there provides his most extended, elaborate commentary
on Christian belief. The common neglect of the third and fourth parts of Leviathan is a mistake, not only because Hobbes himself believed them of fundamental importance to his theorizing of the conditions for civil peace and spiritual repose, but be cause the themes of the latter two parts are present in the first two parts persistently.
The Idea of the Messiah in the Theology of Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes elaborates a conception of the Messiah in his political treatises that is unusual because it seems to combine Jewish and Christian elements. He asserts that Jesus
is the Messiah in the sense of being the earthly king of the Jews as well as the Son of God and king of heaven. To clarify Hobbes’s position and to highlight its strangeness, it is compared with the views of Moses Maimonides and Blaise Pascal. Hobbes emerges from this comparison as a spokesman for a kind of “Jewish Christianity,” whose purpose is not to return to the early Jewish sects that embraced Jesus as a new Moses but to humanize the Messiah and to redefine Christianity for a new age of secular happiness. Hobbes thereby inaugurates a new kind of biblical criticism which the Deists of the enlightenment era developed and which continues today.
King David and Uriah the Hittite in the Political Thought of Thomas Hobbes by Thomas S. Schrock
The most neglected aspect of Hobbes’s attempt to solve the theological political problem is his reliance on divine punishment of the iniquitous sovereign. By turning that matter exclusively over to God or? what comes to the same thing? by immunizing such a sovereign against accountability to his subjects, Hobbes radicalizes a Christian motif and fragments what for Aristotle had been an integral political whole. This essay is about that fragmentation, with special attention to the text in which Hobbes makes his intention
partially clear? his discussion of King David’s murder of Uriah the Hittite.
