Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all!

Indulge your Churchillian obsession with the latest volume of war documents, and behold the labor that his leadership required. 

It’s Christmas Eve today and time for the oldest tradition at Via Meadia, going back to 2009: our annual Yule Blog when we update and present our thirteen posts of Christmas running from the preparatory Advent blog on Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. During the holiday season, we will blog on a light holiday schedule through New Year’s Day. On January 2 we will be back at full force.

What the rise and fall of a 12th-century Islamic empire does (and doesn’t) tell us about the rise (and fall?) of ISIS.

Remembering Fatema Mernissi, a woman on a mission to redefine boundaries for women in the Muslim world.

The ever-expanding boundaries of religious pluralism in America.

Modern Russia, the Obama Administration seems to think, is a fairly normal autocracy with which one can ultimately cooperate on occasion. But reality has never quite fit this “realist” reading of Russia.

After years of the Syrian civil war, the UN is foundering, and putting the President’s foreign policy legacy at risk.

The anxiety that so many Americans feel about domestic affairs today is the source of their fear of the Islamic State—not the other way around.

Polarization is more our problem than our politicians’. The success of the nation requires that we, the people, overcome it.