I’ve just come back from a week of teaching, lecturing and conversation in Israel and the West Bank, and nothing I saw there has led me to change my basic view of the situation.  Peace is not at hand in the Middle East because neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are really willing to accept […]

If you read recent statements by senior US officials on the relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and attacks on US and NATO interests, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a state of war exists between an agency of the government of Pakistan and the United States of America.As the FT reports this morning, Adm […]

That’s what we’ve been seeing on world markets since Thursday trading began in Asia; this morning it hit the US with the kind of sickening thud we remember too well from 2008. Amid the general hurricane of bad economic news a few things stand out. Chinese stocks fell almost 5 percent and key real estate […]

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. Coincidentally, in a recent issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Habermas is on a […]

Recently I posted a short piece saying that the specter of a “Christianist” takeover of the United States is a figment of overheated imaginations, mostly on the left.  Every few years a leftie journalist dabbles in right wing websites and obscure theological debates and emerges with horrifying tales of totalitarian Dominionist plots to turn the […]

There are three Christian journals that I peruse regularly—National Catholic Reporter (liberal Catholic), Christian Century (liberal Protestant) and Christianity Today (conservative Protestant). The adjective “liberal” in the first two journals refers both to their theological and political orientation; Christianity Today is theologically conservative, but has no single political line. The three journals usually appear in […]

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, Via Meadia reflects on one the most painful unintended consequences of that day – the decimation of Iraq’s once significant minority religious groups. Before the invasion of Iraq – which, despite the changing rhetoric used to justify it, would not have happened without the 9/11 attacks – about 1.5 […]

[Over the next few days there will be some posts reflecting on the world 10 years after 9/11.  This is one.] Sometimes it’s important to step back from the daily news and look at the bigger picture. A new Gallup poll on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 brings some welcome news — there appears to […]

The USPS is one of the great surviving examples of the blue social model and, not surprisingly, it is going down the tubes.  Technological change has made its original mission of delivering vital information and private correspondence obsolete.  Judging by what comes in through the mail slot at the stately Mead manor these days, the […]

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, is no longer content to preside over what many still regard as the world’s greatest newspaper. (I don’t, but I read it every day, not because of its pervasive liberal bias, but because it continues to offer the best international coverage of any American newspaper.)  Keller […]