8. Jerusalem: Summary

In this section an attempt has been made to sketch some of the most important developments of the first five hundred years of Christian history. By the year 500 the Church had been for more than a century the only legal religious institution in what remained of the Western Roman Empire, whose subjects were thus, nominally at least, Christians. The Church was an essentially new institution in the Mediterranean World, one with which no previous tribe, polis, nation, or empire had had to come to terms. Because of the position which it enjoyed, the Church had called into existence a new problem, one which persists to this day in Western Civilization: the problem of church and state. From the Roman Empire the Western Church had borrowed the model for what was a large and effective organization, which had in the bishop a figure of great influence, both civil and religious, both real and potential; and in the bishop of Rome one whose claims to head the entire Church had already been advanced and in many ways supported. [excerpt

Tommy Douglas: the road to Jerusalem

Reviewed Book: McLeod, Ian. Tommy Douglas: the road to Jerusalem. Edmonton, Alta: Hurtig Pub, 1987

1. Jerusalem: The Hebrews

Long the political and religious center of the Hebrew people and for a brief time the chief center of Christianity, the city of Jerusalem has been chosen to represent the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western Civilization. Jerusalem is older than Rome, possibly even older than Athens (as far as habitation by the Greeks is concerned), and it will be helpful to keep that fact in mind. Solomon lived perhaps before there was a city of Rome. The kingdom of Judah fell almost a century before the Persians attacked Greece. [excerpt

The Jerusalem Basic Law (1980/2000) and the Jerusalem Embassy Act (1990/95): A comparative investigation of Israeli and US legislation on the status of Jerusalem

This essay, written from a religious studies perspective, compares two pieces of largely symbolic legislation, the Israeli 1980 Jerusalem Basic Law and the US 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, situating them in their respective historical contexts and raising questions about the dynamic of legislative acts that exceed the intention of both those who introduced these bills and the legislators who passed them into law. I argue that these laws indicate the power of broadly-shared public sentiments in modern politics and policy-making, a power that has the potential of overwhelming more pragmatic and cautious approaches to public law

Some notes on crucifixion

This article discusses the injuries caused by crucifixion, based on an adult male skeleton found in ossuary I:4 in north-east Jerusalem in 1968

Menorah Review (No. 53, Fall, 2001)

Uriah Levy and Monticello -- Prejudice and the Military -- The Feminist\u27s Corner -- Derrida Remembers Levinas -- Tu B\u27Shvat -- Jerusalem and Tel Aviv -- Noteworthy Books -- Understanding the Holocaus

Bridging the Risk Modeling Gap: Expanding Climate-Related Risk Insurance Through Global Risk Assessment

In 2015, more than 1,000 natural disasters inflicted some $100 billion worth of economic damages around the world. These natural disasters included severe storms, flooding, extreme temperatures, droughts, and wildfires—all of which are expected to increase in frequency for years to come as a result of climate change. The annual number of such extreme weather events has been increasing, with almost three times as many occurring worldwide from 2000 to 2009 as in the 1980s.Of the total economic losses endured last year from natural disasters, insurance covered only 30 percent. The majority of uninsured losses occurred in developing countries across Africa, Asia, and South America. In Asia, only 8 percent of losses from natural disasters were insured in 2015, and in Africa, only 1 percent of such losses were insured. Without such risk management tools, governments and individuals are less able to prepare for, respond to, cope with, and recover from climate-change-fueled weather events and natural disasters. While insurance can take many forms, risk management in particular includes a lack of access to innovative insurance instruments—such as parametric risk insurance, which is specifically designed to pay out quickly in the aftermath of a natural disaster. This gives countries a rapid injection of capital that can be vital in the early window before overseas assistance is effectively ramped up and delivered.To help address this shortfall, the private sector, national governments, and international financial institutions and organizations are working to build new partnerships aimed at enabling countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate change and related natural disasters to gain access to climate-related risk insurance. These efforts were given a boost in 2015, when at its annual meeting, the G7 announced a goal of expanding access to climate-related risk insurance to 400 million additional people in the most vulnerable developing nations by 2020. This would quintuple the current level of coverage throughout the developing world from 100 million people to half a billion people. In order to meet this goal of making innovative insurance and climate risk-management tools available to so many millions of new people, a critical gap in high-resolution data and cutting-edge modeling needs to be bridged

7. Jerusalem: St. Augustine

Perhaps no individual after Paul exercised an influence on t he history of Christianity comparable to that of Augustine (354- 430). Beyond a doubt the greatest of the Latin Church fathers, he lived during the years when the formative period of the Christian Church was drawing to its close. By the time of his death, the polity, the doctrine, and many of the practices which the Western Church was to carry into the Middle Ages were already clearly recognizable, if not finally set. It was the contribution of Augustine, during the last half of a long and eventful life, to sharpen, expound, and expand upon so many different aspects of the Christian faith and in such a convincing (though sometimes inconsistent) way that there was no significant restatement of Roman Catholic doctrine for more than eight hundred years after his death. When the early Protestants of the sixteenth century wished to return to what they held to be true Christianity, they did so through Augustine. [excerpt