On the last day of Hanukkah, the Sanhedrin called out to the 70 Nations to join in the consecration of the altar for the Third Temple. A full-dress reenactment of the daily sacrifice was held and a representative of a South American nation who attended was the recipient of a miraculous fulfillment of the Messianic promise of the ingathering of the exiles. After months of intensive study, the Sanhedrin ordered a stone altar built, scheduling its dedication to take place on the last day of Hanukkah just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. The square altar is nine feet square and five feet high and is constructed of aerated concrete. The material was ruled to be fit for use in the Temple…

In one of the rounds of fighting between the Israelites and the Philistines, the Israelites decided to deploy an unconventional weapon – the Ark of the Covenant. According to 1 Samuel, the ark was brought to the battlefield, but the outcome was catastrophic. The Israelite army was defeated and the ark fell into enemy hands. The Philistines took it to Ashdod and placed it next to a statue of their god, Dagon. But the ark was to have its revenge: The statue fell, its hands were cut off, and the Philistines were struck with a plague of…

The Vatican’s warm new relationship with the Chinese government is being hailed as a diplomatic victory by the Pope’s supporters. If it is a victory, I’m very afraid it could very well be a pyrrhic one. If so, it will be due to a naïve and misplaced trust in an authoritarian regime whose ill-will toward the faithful of any religion is growing more fierce each day—Catholicism not excluded.

Today, if a patient needs an organ transplant, they have to get on a waiting list and hope someone with a matching organ dies before they do. But in a not-too-distant future, we may be able to grow backups — perhaps even using mini-organs, called organoids, to extend our lives as we replace old organs with fresh ones before the originals fail. And what better place to grow these organs than in the place where organs usually grow: inside an animal. Earlier this year, in a huge step toward this eventual goal, scientists experimenting on mice got much more than they bargained for…

Today’s religious freedom debates are different than in the past. They’ve increased in breadth and intensity. Religious freedom has gotten political. It’s dividing people along lines different than before. In the 1950s and 1960s, religious freedom debates were about issues like whether or not the federal government should give aid to Catholic parochial schools. But over the years, new divisions emerged. We see people who believe in God in contests with people who don’t, or people who value religion and recognize that religion holds society together in contests with people who reject this. Fewer and fewer people believe in God. And if you don’t believe in God, you don’t believe in absolute right and wrong, and you don’t see any benefit to society by giving a special place to religion or religious preachers or activities…

The billion-yuan MRI machine “will revolutionise brain studies”, a senior scientist working on the project told Chinese media. The facility which will house the super-scanner is still being built in the city of Shenzhen in southern China’s Guangdong province. Current MRI scanners can only visualise objects larger than 1mm, but the new device is aimed to visualise objects 1,000 times smaller. “…The information we obtain will increase like ‘boom, boom, boom’,” said a Beijing-based physicist also involved in the project. “We may for the first time capture a full picture of human consciousness or even the essence of life itself…