Human Trustees

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese became a Jesuit priest in 1964 after earning a PhD political science at UC Berkeley, but he has mostly served as a journalist and academic. I find his pieces in Religious News Service consistently informing and thought provoking—including this one from a couple of months ago, “Amos, a prophet for social justice, is a prophet…

I end this series of eight posts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the prospects of ending it by framing the issue theologically. I am a Christian theologian, after all, and I spent my second career researching and writing about Muslim-Christian dialogue. And since the first and greater part of the Bible is the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, and…

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), an international news agency going back to 1917 with stellar journalistic credentials, ran an article in mid-August 2025 with the title, “Jew vs Jew rhetoric breaks hearts in a bitter internal debate about the Gaza war.” In it, Andrew Silow-Carroll argues that almost two years into this Gaza war, “the Jewish conversation has shifted”: “Jews…

On September 9, my good friend Jack Wald (from 1970s seminary days) and I took a train to Washington, DC to deliver letters protesting US policy vis à vis Israel to our elected representatives. In particular, we were urging them to vote against sending any more weapons to Israel, as they have been using them in their brutal war in…

I ended my last post by referring to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem’s 2021 press release declaring that their nation was committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories. This was the subtitle, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: this is apartheid.” In fact, they were referring…

Most would have predicted that the first American president to call himself “born again” (hence, evangelical Protestant) would be a staunch defender of the state of Israel. As you will remember from my first post in this series, a large majority of evangelicals are “Christian Zionists,” and therefore unsympathetic to any call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.…