Atheists have been in the news lately, often in connection with lawsuits in defense of their right to the free exercise of their worldview and for equal treatment with religious worldviews. Such litigation has occurred in both the United States and Europe, but the latter is more secularized, which makes for a rather different situation. […]

I promised you yesterday, dear reader, a post arguing that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I promised, as well, an argument to the effect that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, […]

For those hoping that Georgia’s seemingly endless political turmoil would subside after 2012’s transfer of power, the last seven months have offered little respite. Though the new government has made some genuine headway with a variety of important reforms, such initiatives have largely played second fiddle to a regular drumbeat of despair. The latest such […]

On June 22, 2013, the New York Times (in a story by Mark Oppenheimer, one of its regular religion reporters), carried an account of yet another skirmish in the culture war within the Episcopal Church. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, preached a sermon in Curacao, the […]

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking […]

Religion and politics are never far apart in the Promised Land, but a new intra-religious civil war with a characteristically Israeli mix of high-octane ideology and gutter-level politicking has lately been grabbing the headlines. Unseemly as the whole thing is, the conflict has at least one virtue: It is laying some fundamental questions of commitment […]

Last week’s European Summit in Brussels has become a pale afterthought in record time. The reasons are threefold. First, the summit has been overshadowed by other events, not least in Egypt, but also those surrounding the Snowden affair. Second, expectations were low to being with, since the summit preceded politically pregnant elections in Germany this […]

Political upheavals are reckoned by the currency of accelerated experience. Human beings perceive time in many ways (more on time in a future post), but three fill out the spectrum. There is geological time, measured in hundreds of thousands and millions of years. There is personal time, measured by the sentient moments afforded by our […]

From the very beginning of the so-called revolution in Egypt, I have taken some pains to throw a wet mop in the face of all those clueless Western commentators who believed that democracy, as we understand it, let alone liberal democracy, was at hand in Egypt—or anywhere else in the Arab world save maybe Tunisia. […]