Articles on Judaism and Israel by Noted Catholic Authors

Folks, I want to bring your attention to this bundle of articles on Israel and Judaism by noted Catholic authors and bloggers. The first one, and perhaps the heftiest one, was written by noted scholar Michael Novak, a fellow Pennsylvanian,  a theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador under Ronald Reagan, among many other achievements. Mr. Novak published this article in InsideCatholic.com on June 30, but it originally appeared in the September 2006 issue of Crisis Magazine. The title is The Two Novaks: Jews, Christians, and the One True God. It’s long, so I will only quote for you some of the salient points:

· In these days of an aggressive anti-religious fever and a rising secularism -- days in which, simultaneously, generations of amicable pluralistic experience have nourished bonds of trust and familiarity between Jews and Christians that were seldom felt before -- something new is possible. It is now even a necessary thing to stress what Jews and Christians share in common.

· Judaism is not Christianity. Christianity is not Judaism. There are points at which the two religions are -- or appear to be -- in complete contradiction to one another. (That "appear" phrase pops up in order to allow for God's way of seeing the matter.) Christians must hold that in some way -- which Jews cannot in honesty accept -- Christianity adds to and goes beyond Judaism. And Jews must hold in some way -- which Christianity cannot in honesty accept -- that Christ was not what He said He was.

· To Jews, the Trinitarian God of Christianity must seem a breach of monotheism. To Christians, the God of Judaism must seem inadequately revealed in His inner dynamism and communion of life.

· Jews cannot in good faith accept Christian theories that their own religion has been "superceded" by Christianity, whether in the radical sense of vacating the Covenant of Moses with God or in the less severe sense of "a branch grafted onto the tree" (Rom 11:17-24).

· In days of publicly lauded and highly promoted sexual immorality, it is also necessary for Jews and Christians to come to the defense of family life, the core of all authentic human community, by steadfastly opposing all those degradations of the human body that "Judaism and Christianity teach to be universally prohibited (incest, adultery, homosexuality, and bestiality)."

Noted Catholic apologist and writer Jimmy Akin wrote the next one, in two parts, on his blog at the National Catholic Register. The title is Israel: Whose Land Is It Anyway? Part I and Part II. His thesis is very similar to When Anti-Zionism Turns Into Anti-Semitism, my hurried translation of another post I wrote in Spanish in response to a “traditional Catholic” from Argentina who openly spouses anti-Semitism. The nugget is this: people can disagree about the existence of the State of Israel from religious or philosophical reasons without one lapsing into anti-Semitism, and one can criticize the actions of the State of Israel without being labeled as such.

Anyway, I think all these articles are worth your time. Happy reading and Happy Fourth of July!