After decades of doubt and confusion, the Union turns out to have been worth fighting for after all.

A man named George Cornewall Lewis saved the Union. Really.

Domestic politics still clashes with strategic imperatives in U.S. Afghan policy.

How Americans have commemorated the Civil War at fifty, one hundred and 150 years tells us who we are as a nation-in-progress.

Having been studying religion in all its magnificent diversity, I am now on every sort of mailing list—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Eastern Christian Orthodox. I get print and electronic publications from all these sources, as well as from some others (including a shrilly anti-American bulletin from a supposedly progressive Islamic center in Malaysia). For some time […]

The government of India announced this week that it “agreed in principle” to the anti-corruption plan put forward by Anna Hazare, a modern-day civil disobedience campaigner in the mode of Mahatma Gandhi.  Hazare’s  twelve-day fast gripped the imagination of everyone in India who follows politics and was the culmination of weeks of demonstrations against corruption […]

Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom.  All […]

As Hurricane Irene barrels up the coast and the weather service warns about hurricane conditions in New York, at Via Meadia this morning we are more concerned with short term weather forecasts than with medium term economic predictions. Nevertheless I see from the Twitter feed that Nouriel Rubini (@Nouriel) is predicting a double dip recession […]

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline will carry oil from tar sands in Canada across the entire midwestern United States to Port Arthur, Texas. It could eventually transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day and without government funding of any kind has the potential to create 20,000 jobs starting early in 2012. The greens want President […]

In its issue of August 9, 2011, The Christian Century reported that Michele Bachmann, the Republican presidential candidate, had resigned from her church six days before launching her campaign. (This was also reported in some secular media.) The church in question is Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minnesota, which is affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical […]