What a difference a year makes.  Last year at this time, the Great Green Delusion — that the United Nations process could deliver a treaty that would stop global warming dead in its tracks — was the hottest idea in town.  Those who dissented were scorned and despised; the environmental movement and its army of […]

As World War Two broke out in Poland, WH Auden wrote about the despair of watching “the clever hopes expire/of a low, dishonest decade.” We are not yet at that pass, but Auden’s poem bears re-reading by anybody trying to read the signs of our increasingly dark and troubled times.There are times when the ideas […]

On November 13, 2010, there were two stories about religion, separated by four pages, in The New York Times. The first, filed by Laurie Goodstein (who reports regularly on religion), dealt with a conference of Roman Catholic bishops on procedures of exorcism. The other story, by Mark Oppenheimer (another regular Times reporter), told of an […]

Yesterday’s North Korean attack on South Korea has evidently frightened many people. That’s natural, for there is some incalculable but not trivial prospect that the fighting could escalate into a huge bloody mess. The attack, and the South Korean response, seems to have led to an emergency National Security Council meeting from which the President […]

As regular visitors to this space will have noticed, I have been unusually slow to post during the last week.  This is not because I’m running out of steam as a blogger.  And it’s not because this is a slow news week.  In recent days the European financial crisis took a dark turn for the […]

In the current issue of The Christian Century there are three items about Lutherans. One is about the economic difficulties incurred by congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) who have left that denomination to protest its decision in August 2009 to allow non-celibate gay clergy and to bless same-sex unions. Thus far […]

Life keeps getting worse for President Obama.  It is not just that the conservative press, which never liked him, has a new note of confidence and even joy as it pursues a quarry whose blood reporters think they can smell.  It is not just that he lost control of Congress in the midterms.  No: the […]

The Iraqi political class has finally struck a deal on government formation—but what does the deal mean? To begin with, it means the Iranian project of entrenching in power incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Shiite religious parties that support him for another five years has succeeded—a project that has been in the works […]

In the book which has by now become an important point of reference, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington developed the thesis that after the demise of the Cold War conflicts would be between civilizations rather than ideologies. The thesis has been hotly discussed ever since, mostly unfavorably. I […]

President Obama has begun the second half of his presidential term with a planned ten-day tour of Asia.  Even beneath the haze of skepticism (from critics who accused the President of fleeing the country in the aftermath of the disastrous midterm election) and the clouds of spin (from administration staffers who sought to draw the […]