The Connector

An atheist debater turned Catholic intellectual, Leah Libresco Sargeant is building a new kind of feminism grounded in faith, reason, and the dignity of dependence
By Brad East

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Podcast

Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Podcast

Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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Letters to the Editor

“Devout” or “Observant”?

 I really enjoyed your conversation with Molly Worthen. So interesting to hear an intellectual talk about what it's like to become an evangelical Christian. I'm Jewish, live in Berkeley Cal., and attend a Modern Orthodox shul, though I myself am not orthodox. I'm writing to point out something I noticed recently: Christians of faith are described as devout; Jews of faith are described as observant. Here's how I came to this realization.  I belong to a desert hiking group. I…

CrossFit and the Frontier Spirit

By Katie Rose Hejtmanek
The fitness regimen CrossFit was created in 2001, using the internet to give out free daily workouts. From the beginning, it was built on a survivalist, militaristic approach. CrossFit claims to train participants as if they were Navy SEALs preparing for disaster, war, or the apocalypse, and it names special workouts after soldiers who have died during the war on terror (“Hero WODs,” or workouts of the day). CrossFit claims to have gyms in 162 countries around the world, including on U.S. military outposts. Greg Glassman, the founder and one-time sole owner of CrossFit, identifies as a college-dropout personal trainer…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.