On January 8, Tikvah Fund executive director Eric Cohen sat down to talk with George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Weigel is one of the country’s most prolific thinkers and writers about religion, ethics, and contemporary culture. His 17 books include a biography of Pope John Paul II and analyses of the “just war” doctrine and the challenges posed by modern jihadism; his most recent work examines evangelical Catholicism in the 21st century.

The Cohen-Weigel conversation gives a sense of the breadth of Mr. Weigel’s interests. It covers just war theory, which Mr. Weigel thinks is in “rather robust shape as an intellectual tradition” but, because of its uncertain reception in the mainline churches, is “not in such good shape” as a politically influential body of thought. The conversation also touches on Christian-Jewish relations, where Mr. Weigel thinks that for the first time in 2,000 years the two religions are able to transcend matters of historical misunderstanding and “reconvene” to talk about fundamental questions of faith. Finally, the conversation touches on the critical question facing modern Islam: whether it can draw on resources of its own to develop modern doctrines of religious tolerance and a separation between religious and political authorities.

Jonathan Yudelman is 2013-2014 Tikvah Fellow. His article, “The Christian Theologian of Zion,” will appear in the February issue of First Things. The article explores the life and thought of Marcel Dubois, an important 20th century Catholic theologian in Israel. In the course of doing so, it raised issues about Jewish-Catholic relations generally:

Israel could not have hoped for as passionate an admirer as Fr. Marcel-Jacques Dubois, this most Israeli of traditionalist Catholic theologians, yet received at the same time almost as passionate a critic. His story and its theological legacy bring into sharp relief some of the permanent obstacles in Jewish–Christian relations.

Christmas was this week and God’s love is in the air. But do Christian sources and Jewish ones think of the love of God in overlapping or opposing ways? Renowned Harvard bible scholar and Tikvah faculty regular Jon Levenson is working on a new book on the love of God—what it means for God to love human beings and for human beings to love God. What is being commanded when a Jew is enjoined to love God “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Is passion an imperfection, unworthy of God? What is the “pretty dirty” love poem Shir haShirim (Song of Songs) doing in the Bible?

Professor Levenson sat down with Tikvah’s Director of University Programs Alan Rubenstein in Princeton last summer to discuss this profound subject. You can watch the 28 minute conversation here.

Is there a philosophical or theological justification for the traditional Jewish doctrine of matrilineal descent? Meir Soloveichik, in an article published in Azure in 2005, makes the case that there is, drawing together phenomenological observations and rabbinical sources to illuminate the distinct dignity of mothers and fathers. Rabbi Soloveichik will be teaching in a Tikvah Advanced Institute this summer called The Future of the Family, alongside Eric Cohen, Gil Meilaender, Dara Horn, and others.

One of the most remarkable things about the Jewish and Christian traditions is that they both revere figures who predated the central events of their redemptive histories. Both hold in high esteem the patriarchs of Genesis—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob— even though these figures precede Moses or Jesus. The cases of Isaac and Jacob are complicated […]