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Current policies include the requirement that public spending not exceed 30 percent of gross domestic product and that new taxes be approved by a referendum. Saakashvili also noted that Georgia is ranked 11th in the world by the World Bank for ease of doing business...
...plotline explains how Seltzer came to write such a book, recounting his trajectory from life as a long-suffering graduate student in the humanities to becoming personally concerned with matters of faith. Under the tutelage of Jonas Elijah Klapper—a Harold Bloom caricature—Cass visited New Walden, a cloistered Hasidic enclave where men and women walk on different sides of the street and modernity has yet to intrude. There Cass meets Azarya, a child prodigy who at the age of six has derived complex mathematical proofs without any formal education. But Azarya is also...
When it comes to sketching Jewish tradition, and the life of New Walden’s Hasidim, however, Goldstein’s understanding is slightly weaker. She gets the names of Hasidic customs wrong—dubbing the mystical Hasidic custom of waiting to cut a boy’s hair until his third birthday an “upshneering” instead of the Yiddish “upsherin”—and her Klapper character deduces the numerical value of his Hebrew name using a form of gematria so obscure that Goldstein is either being very...
...much more at home in the academic realm than in the religious gradually becomes clear. For all her novel’s ambition to portray and explain the modern religious experience, it is unable to shake sufficiently free of its author’s initial presumptions. Like many new atheist tracts, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” paints the religion-and-reason question in Manichean terms. This sort of framing can highlight sharp distinctions in philosophies, but doesn’t begin to approach the varieties of religious experience—or illusion?...
...intellectual banter, witty academic satire and thoughtful portrayal of religious life and community—all of which make this a far more elegant and effective work than any new atheist polemic—“36 Arguments for the Existence of God” still simplifies its subject, and so falls short of meeting its own ambitious standards. A novel that considers rational religionists and non-materialists on their own terms, while maintaining its strong intellectual reservations, would make a worthy sequel to this excellent but incomplete entry into the genre...