For some decades now there has been a debate over the alleged Western bias of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the multitude of activities that have emanated from it. The debate has typically focused on the priority of individual rights over collective or communal rights. The former are supposed to be characteristic of […]

Making connections between the current engagement in Libya and our ongoing project in Iraq is not usually well received. To be fair, there are perhaps more differences than similarities. The European Union’s plans to ask, at last, for UN permission to send ground troops into Libya is nothing if not agonizingly slow in coming to […]

Last year I posted a series on the top ten trends that would shape the new decade and introduced it with a piece on the core reality driving events in our time: the accelerating pace of change.  Driven by forces hardwired into science and capitalism, history is speeding up, societies around the world are being […]

Most of what people write and say about international relations is sheer claptrap.  That is especially true when diplomats and distinguished journalists convene.  Get yourself on the international rubber chicken circuit and you will soon discover a world of pompous gasbags relentlessly pounding their audiences with barrages of platitudes.  Worse, you may start flapping your […]

Brazil is ground zero for global greens.  Home of the largest and richest rainforest system in the world, Brazil is where the fight for biodiversity and the fight against deforestation will be either won or lost.  At the Copenhagen Summit, Brazil played a key role in failed negotiations that killed the Green Dream of a […]

How can a gynecologist manage to have sex?  Presumably by resolutely switching from one mindset to another.  How can a New Testament scholar manage to be a Christian? Presumably by a similar exercise of mental compartmentalization.I don’t know whether there is a literature dealing with the sexual problems of gynecologists (I have no intention of […]

For regular readers wondering why there haven’t been many posts for the last week, I have been on a lecture tour in Brazil, participating with American Interest colleague and longtime friend Dr. Josef Joffe of the Hoover Institution and Die Zeit, in a series of conversations, seminars and exchanges with Brazilian thinkers, businesspeople, journalists and […]

In The Christian Century of March 22, 2011, there is an interesting column by Philip Jenkins, the historian who more than anyone else has drawn our attention to the demographic shift of Christianity to the developing countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia. Under the title “Mexico’s Crisis of Faith”, Jenkins suggests that the present […]

There are two big mistakes most Americans make about our inner city problems:  we believe that the troubles of the inner city are mostly about race, and we believe that they can be solved without God.The failure of the blue social model to solve the problems of the underclass in America’s inner cities was one […]

Niccolo Machiavelli is one of those rare writers so well known that his name has become an adjective; ‘Machiavellian’ means crafty and ruthless.  And over the centuries, Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, has vexed moralists for its seeming defiance of all moral laws. The ruler, Machiavelli tells us, must not just learn to do […]