The struggle pits Orthodox sensibilities against secular demands for personal freedom, and challenges the authorities to reconcile religious imperatives with civil liberties.

I agree in principle that religious and moral imperatives are above military orders, but in this case there is no conflict.

For three days, bin Laden preached to his prospective recruits about the religious imperative of reversing America's corrosive presence in the gulf.

Many of the Army of God members describe themselves as ministers and cloak their vicious ideology in religious imperatives.

In addition, both discourses make use of, among other rhetorical instruments, "religious imperatives" supposedly "proven" by religious sources, and conspiracy theories.

Scholars and other commentators vary as to whether they are just and whether they are a correct interpretation of religious imperatives.

Everyone, especially in Jerusalem, where religious, historical, cultural and social imperatives collide, has a gremlin inside whispering that it may not be safe.

AS the city grows ever more diverse and complex, the number of parking-sensitive days keeps expanding as each group demands its own, regardless of religious imperatives.

Others, more typically, cite religious imperatives to populate every corner of the biblical Land of Israel, Gaza included.

Aside from such large matters, comparatively mundane yet important questions arise about how much slack Jews have to adapt millenniums-old religious imperatives to modern life.