Remembering Iraq

Seven years ago this week the first bombs were falling in Iraq and the war was breaking out, a war that caused untold suffering in Iraq, led to waves of anti-American feeling around the world, polarized politics in the United States, broke the administration of George W. Bush, and contributed to one of the most […]

Faith Matters Sunday: Errand To The World

This week I’ve been re-reading William R. Hutchison’s Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions.  It’s a great book about a vital subject that too many people know nothing about.Americans, even many American historians, don’t generally know very much about the history of our country.  This is partly because we’ve stopped teaching […]

Jet Lag and Blogging Don’t Mix

As some have noticed, blogging has been slow here at the stately Mead manor the last few days.  I got in late yesterday from Lithuania, and today I somehow just didn’t have much to say.  Tonight was also a culture night; I had tickets to Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera. The singing was fantastic; the […]

The Museum of the KGB

North Korea, the world’s only country-sized prison camp, has just executed Pak Nam Gi for the crime of ‘deliberately harming’ the country’s economy.  I personally don’t think economic sabotage ought to be a capital crime, but if it is, the firing squads of North Korea have a lot of work ahead of them.  Pak  was […]

Obama and the Jacksonian Zionists

Last week the Israelis handed the Obama administration an important advantage in the continuing struggle between the US and Israel over policy towards the Palestinians.  By announcing a decision to move forward with 1600 housing units in East Jerusalem, the Israelis embarrassed the administration in a way that created problems for Prime Minister Netanyahu and […]

The Israel Crisis

The war of words between the Obama administration and the Israeli government continues to heat up.  “This was an affront, it was an insult, but most importantly, it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region,” White House senior adviser David Axelrod told the world on NBC yesterday. Axelrod of course was […]

Wanted: A Mainlinegelical Church

The fundamentalist-modernist split in American Protestantism is roughly one hundred years old.  It has been an unmitigated disaster and the cost of this division is growing.The problem is not so much with fundamentalists and fundamentalist-aligned Pentecostals.  These churches and congregations are doing what they always have done: meeting the spiritual needs of the marginalized, the […]

Literary Saturday: Beautiful Losers

I am leaving the paneled halls of the stately Mead manor today to spend a week giving lectures on American foreign policy in Lithuania.  This is a kind of trip I’ve been making for the State Department since the Clinton administration, and it’s taught me a lot.  During the Bush years I traveled pretty intensively […]

Is This Lobby Different From All Others?

The American relationship with Israel is both a political and an intellectual challenge for some students of foreign affairs.  Convinced that US national interests would be best served by distancing ourselves from the Jewish state, scholars try to figure out why our country behaves in this seemingly self-defeating way.The problem is particularly tough for hard […]

The Israel Lobby and Gentile Power

The more I’ve studied the long-term politics of Zionism in the United States, the more I’ve been struck by a paradox.  While most people see the Israel lobby as an attempt to use Jewish financial and electoral power to impose a special Jewish agenda on American foreign policy, it hasn’t actually worked that way.In the […]

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