This Christmas season, it’s worth remembering just how horrible things have gotten in Syria. This Washington Post dispatch is worth reading in full to get a taste of the privations and challenges the people of Aleppo are facing on a daily basis: …the onset of this second winter since Syrians rose up against their government […]

It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close. Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own: “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing […]

Religion News Service on December 14, 2012, carried a story about a Southern Baptist pastor in Missouri who has been accused of child abuse. At first I glossed over the story, having had my fill of stories about clerical pedophilia (though it is, so to speak, ecumenically welcome that for once the alleged offense cannot […]

[The traditional Via Meadia Yule Blog continues today, Boxing Day, with the third of the Thirteen Posts of Christmas.  From Christmas Eve through to Twelfth Night, we explore the Christmas story and the ideas behind the celebration.]The documentary sources for the Christmas story pretty good by the standards of the ancient world, but few and […]

There is an unremarked paradox in the tumult of the contemporary Middle East. Syria is an economically impoverished country of a little more than 20 million people that has been politically stagnant until 23 months ago. Egypt, by contrast, never socially at rest and with its ancient energies newly bestirred, is at 80.5 million people […]

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! Chrismas is a tense morning wherever the Meads gather, as we jump whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other […]

[It’s Christmas Eve today and time for the oldest tradition at Via Meadia: our annual Yule Blog when we update and present our thirteen posts of Christmas running from Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. During this holiday season in 2012-2013 we will blog on a light holiday schedule through New Year’s Day and on January […]

It’s the fourth Sunday in Advent today and even the crustiest and most Christmas-resistant among us are beginning to thaw. The Mead family is preparing its Christmas Day get-together and though sadly some beloved faces are no longer with us at the holiday table, new arrivals by birth and by marriage keep increasing our tribe. […]

Since the right wing of Kansas’ Republican party gained control over the state government last month (defeating both Democrats and moderate Republicans to establish perhaps the most pro-Tea Party state government anywhere in the United States), we’ve been keeping an eye on developments there that could tell us what Tea Party governance would look like.A […]

Earlier this week, the redoubtable blogger and world’s greatest (living) zombie specialist Dan Drezner put on his language cop hat and took issue with our use of the ‘bubble’ word as a signifier for our continuing coverage of one piece of the higher ed story: Here’s the FT definition of an asset bubble: When the prices […]