On June 27, 2010, Belgian police raided the offices of the Roman Catholic  Bishops’ Conference in Brussels while a meeting of that organization was going on. The police was looking for evidence of cover-ups of crimes of child abuse by members of the clergy. While a search of the premises was undertaken, a group of […]

As the reports from Dutch and British watchdog panels came in last week, greens hailed what they see as a vindication of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit and the partial rehabilitation of the IPCC, but they are wrong.  As usual, the greens (and many of their critics) are missing the point.The Big Green Lie […]

The disintegration of the world’s third largest Christian ecclesiastical community marches on.  (The Roman Catholics with more than a billion members and the 300 million member Greek Orthodox communions are the two largest; the Pentecostal and charismatic movement worldwide is larger than the Greek Orthodox community but is not organized into a single group of […]

As regular readers of this space know, I was in London last week and took the opportunity to visit some of the sites associated with some of the important thinkers and writers who shaped the modern world.  I visited the tomb of one of the Founding Fathers of the Blogosphere,  Joseph Addison, in Poet’s Corner […]

In recent posts I’ve been hinting at new developments at The American Interest Online; I’m happy to share the first of these with you today.Peter Berger, a renowned sociologist, widely considered the world’s leading scholar on the role of religion in the contemporary world and one of the great socially engaged intellectuals of our time, […]

A Chinese sage wrote to an elderly scholar retired from official duties with two suggestions—to acquire a young concubine, or to learn how to paint dragons on red silk.  I am an elderly scholar and I have now retired from most of my official duties.  I have given serious thought to the two suggestions and […]

The last time Spain faced the Netherlands in a really big match they were wearing cuirasses and carrying swords. Nobody will be killed at Sunday’s World Cup match, but the Dutch will sing the same anthem—Het Wilhelmus—that they sang in 1573 at the siege of Haarlem and in 1577 when the Prince of Orange’s forces […]

Welcome to my last post; it’s been a great run.This is not the last post I will make on the blog; it’s the last post I have written as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  There are still a few loose ends to tie up, a few things to pack in the […]

London is an odd place for an American to spend the Fourth of July, but the way the schedule worked out this summer, this happened to be the best time for me to make a quick trip.  I’ve been putting some ideas together about Anglo-American relations, the decline and fall of great powers and the […]

I am spending about a week in London and it has been harder than usual to find time to post.  That will change shortly; I look forward to getting back on track with the blog.  London is a city of bloggers: Pepys, Addison, Steele, Johnson — and it’s hard not to be inspired here.