Word: morale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Night. New Yorker James Gray makes grimy melodramas (Little Odessa, The Yards) about working-class guys from the outer boroughs who are forced to face moral dilemmas or brutally erase them. The main characters in this new one are a cop father (Robert Duvall) and his two sons, one a cop (Mark Wahlberg), the other (Joaquin Phoenix) the manager of a Brighton Beach nightclub crawling with Russian mobsters. The police are portrayed as stalwart but mostly dewy do-gooders, so they fade in screen appeal next to the Russky tough guys - nothing like a monster mobster with a guttural accent...
...then, we have voted for Presidents of several different faiths. Some have drawn near to God with their mouths while their hearts remained far from him. We should put religious labels aside and ask candidates about policy positions and try to discern whether their faith puts them on a moral high ground for the betterment of our nation...
Doggerel aside, Neusner, 74, lives by the story's moral: confrontation is part of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene...
...Jikei Hospital's stork cradle is also a reminder that options are few for Japanese couples facing unwanted pregnancies. Many opt for abortion. Japan has no legal or moral opposition to ending pregnancies, and the abortion rate is a relatively high 22.2% - 22.2 abortions for every 100 live births - and is rising fast among women below 25, despite the fact that premarital cohabitation is rare in Japan. But while abortion is common, adoption in Japan is virtually unheard of, although there are many couples eager to take in children. But the law is stacked in favor of birth parents' rights...
...that we're there to fight al-Qaeda. But it's also probable that without a political deal, the sectarian conflict between the Sunnis and Shi'ites will intensify-and eventually explode when the U.S. military pulls back from Iraq. The stakes in Iraq then become questions of moral responsibility and regional stability. "How many Srebrenicas do you have the stomach for?" a senior U.S. official asked me, referring to the Bosnian massacre by the Serbs in 1995. Given the antipathy of the American people for the war, I'd guess the public reaction would be, "Those Arabs are just...