Quotes from Peter Manseau

It's perhaps significant that God declares His completed Creation "very good" and that Adam is an afterthought, his goodness unspecified.

No other foreskin could have caused such trouble.

THAT NO ONE knows what happened to Jesus's foreskin is particularly interesting because there used to be upwards of a dozen in circulation.

The goyim are a curious people," Malpesh once said to me, before he had discovered who and what I was. "Not curious that they want to know things," he clarified, "curious that they don't.

Traduttore, traditore.

A boy with a story must write.

The always popular notion that the United States is in "moral decline" (a phrase favored in the pulpits and the press of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) rests on the assumption that Americans used to be far more religious and should strive to return to their former fidelity.

With the decree issued in March of 1492, all the Jews in Spain were given six months to leave. Two hundred thousand would ultimately abandon their homes and livelihoods in the only land their families had known for generations. Like the riches of Alhambra, much of the wealth of Jews fleeing Torquemada's fires fell into royal hands, which in turn financed Columbus's expedition of commerce and evangelism.

The American experiment was frequently shaped by a rejection of old ways and openness to the new. In religious terms, this rejection created over time a nation unique in its ability to absorb and be built by those of different beliefs; people who believed there were many gods, or none at all.

January 20, 2009, was also the first time a newly elected president used the occasion sometimes called a secular sermon to the nation to give voice to the diversity of religious life among its people. "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims," Obama said, "Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

in the late 1970s, the controversial "Iroquois influence theory" posits that the Longhouse People's divinely given Great Law of Peace so inspired Franklin and others among the founding fathers that it served as the model for the Articles of Confederation, the governing document of the United States for the first decade of its existence, and the precursor of the Constitution ratified in 1787.

By entwining the story of his life with verses from the Quran and an acknowledgment of the new Christian terms to which he must adapt, Omar ibn Said created less a tale of conversion than a syncretic narrative: Like that of so many others, his is a story not of the religious remaking of a people but of a people remaking religious traditions to serve their altered circumstances.

Do you not know the cause and reason of their coming?" They did not, the people replied. "They adore a certain Covetous Deity," Hatuey explained, "whose cravings are not to be satisfied by a few moderate offerings, but they may answer his Adoration and Worship, demand many unreasonable things of us, and use their utmost endeavors to subjugate and afterwards murder us.

I had been a religion major, with a focus on scriptural languages, and upon receiving my degree, felt qualified to do--nothing.

En wat is nu de moraal van dit verhaal?' vroeg Minkovski. 'Dat een slimme Jood zich uit elke onaangename situatie weet te redden,' zei Zinnenoff.

De weduwe kuste haar vingers en legde ze daarna tegen mijn voorhoofd. 'Zet Sasja uit je hoofd,' zei ze. 'Leef je leven op de plek waar je bent.

Hoe bang ik ook was, ik besefte dat dit altijd het lot van een dichter zou zijn: geïsoleerd en alleen te zijn, naar antwoorden te haken, met als gezelschap slechts letters en niet-aflatende kwellingen.

Washington gave the order to Major General John Sullivan that no matter what complaints he heard from the local tribes, he should "not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected.

To understand the reception a religious outlier like Livingston received when he began publishing thoughts that strained the tolerance of more orthodox believers, it is first necessary to consider religious adherence—and the lack thereof—in the English colonies.