Welcome listeners to the next edition of the editor's desk.

I'm Rusty Reno, editor of first things, and today I'm with Liel Olivitz, the eminent columnist, regular columnist,

in our foreign magazine, and editor at large at tabletmag.com Tablet Magazine. One of the, I think,

most important publications out there, and one one publishes material that I often envy.

So, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you, and shalom.

Thanks.

We're going to talk, well, we'll talk generally.

You've got your column for the January issue on, basically, it's a kind of theological interpretation of Hamas, but more than Hamas.

It's a kind of theological interpretation of, I guess, terrorism, recourse to violence

without any sort of regard or law constraint.

Godlessness, if you.

God, yes, godlessness, yes.

So what is, like, why, in what sense pagan?

You know, I have been struggling for quite some time to make sense of what is transpiring all around us.

You see people who should know better, making preposterous assumptions while observing the human

body, which is clearly gendered in every cell, saying, well, it is now a recorded fact that

there are indeed 57 genders, and indeed they're fluid, and indeed you could choose them.

And none of this makes sense.

And I try to sort of kind of grapple with what is the ideological system, if any, that motivates

these people.

And the atrocities of October 7th, in which

...