Jesus, Interrupted Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About them) By Bart D. Ehrman HarperOne, 2009, 292 pages   Reviewed by Israel Drazin   Can knowledgeable people who are convinced that what they read in the Bible is not totally true, who see that many of their coreligionists have [...]

Tolstoy A Russian Life By Rosamund Bartlett Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, 544 pages    Rosamund Bartlett, an authority on Russian culture, describes Lev Tolstoy, as she calls him, the greatest Russian writer, probably a genius, but a failure as a man. When he was young, he drank too much, gambled, and was over amorous with [...]

By Israel Drazin I think that the messianic age is not a miraculous affair and the messiah is not a supernatural figure. There will be a gradual evolutionary and educative process that will improve people and encourage everyone, or nearly everyone, to live in harmony and work together to improve every individual and society. I [...]

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ By Jose Saramago   The reviews of 1998 Noble Prize winner Jose Saramago’s brilliant book on Amazon and elsewhere have generally been quite comprehensive, very well written, and informative. Therefore I will not delve again into the aspects of the novel that they discussed, such as the book’s plot; [...]