Examining the philosophical works of the great 20th-century sage Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Catholic thinker Matthew Rose argues that Christians have much to learn from them, especially about how to confront the challenges of modernity. Rose also notes that Soloveitchik’s best-known book, The Lonely Man of Faith—which begins with the distinction between the Adam of Genesis 1 whose task is to “fill the earth and subdue it” and the Adam of Genesis 2 whose task is to “serve and safeguard”—began as a lecture to Catholic seminarians.

Soloveitchik did not accuse modernity of dividing what had once been integrated. He charged it with doing precisely the opposite. He argued, in effect, that modernity’s most powerful ideologies and institutions are trying to unify human nature—not by harmonizing its two discordant aspects, but by abolishing one of them.

In his 1965 lectures at St. John’s Seminary, Soloveitchik spoke out of Jewish loneliness in a Gentile world—a loneliness, he implied, that faithful Christians would soon experience amid the onrushing secular revolution. His reading of Genesis offered subtle advice: relinquish any dreams of building a Christian order that would restore the imagined harmonies of premodern life. Our divided natures, he insisted, and not only our disordered loves, make such a society an illusion. But unlike many Christian thinkers in that disruptive decade, Soloveitchik was no less worried about the demons of secularism, and he warned both Jews and Christians against internalizing the stunted perspective of Adam the First. For the ambition to overcome Adam the Second, and to replace the hope for redemption with the ideal of liberation, masked its own darkness.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.