“I am a Peace Corps Volunteer.” Like 98 percent of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, I was proud to declare this and believe my two-year service was worthwhile. I grew professionally and personally, and I did some good. But the program is broken in many ways.More than 210,000 Americans have served as volunteers in 139 countries […]

Nir Barkat made headlines around the world as he won this week’s mayoral elections in Jerusalem—perhaps a surprising level of attention for a city with a population of 800,000. Yet this election campaign, waged between incumbent Mayor Nir Barkat and challenger Moshe Leon, was a microcosm of the demographic, cultural, and religious conflicts that are […]

Fedor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs, remarked in a presentation to London’s Centre for European Reform on October 8 that Ukraine is a state, not a nation. This is a fairly typical Russian observation, often intended to suggest that Ukraine is not quite legitimate as a separate entity. It is also a […]

A grand historical drama in the Middle East is moving towards a moment of decision, and the fate of President Obama’s foreign policy and much else besides is hanging by a thread. As two storms shake the foundations of the region’s political order (the Shi’a-Sunni war and the crisis of legitimacy across the region opened […]

The Tablet is the British Catholic periodical that is very useful in keeping informed about developments in the Roman world. On October 5, 2013 [paywalled], it published three seemingly unrelated items which, at least in my mind, raised again the interesting question about what will happen next under the pontificate of Francis I.In the years following […]

[With this essay, I’m returning to a series that I began late last spring on the five most important problems facing the American people today. Readers who want to go back and look at the first essays in this series can look here, here, and here. The first problem treated in the series was the […]

Last May I launched a series of blog posts on “the Big Five,” the five domestic problems that Americans have to address if the next few decades are going to go well. I planned to go on and write about them all, but after writing a couple of essays about the job crisis and another […]

If this blog had a political rather than religious focus, I would now link to the online bulletin of the University of Papua New Guinea, specifically the proceedings of its recent conference entitled “Is the United States Ready for Democracy?” Although the conference was meticulously fair in presenting different points of view (thus living up […]

I just spent two weeks traveling across Europe, visiting France, Italy, Germany, and Romania. Everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about Washington’s dispiriting budget shenanigans, the European implications of the “pivot to Asia” and the mess in the Middle East. But while the Europeans are more or less united on the subject of America’s […]

We are all caught up in the quickening whirl of technological change. As consumers we recognize that accelerating technology has had many benefits, such as quicker access to information, goods, and family and friends. Yet this change can also create many new social problems—from an aging population to employees displaced by machines to new kinds […]