Aaron David Miller is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Palestine conflict.  He’s been at the heart of American negotiations on the issue for many years; few people can match his detailed knowledge of the ins and outs of the negotiating process or of the personalities and the agendas of the leading actors […]

I’ve written in some of my past posts about the problems faced by mainline churches, concentrating especially on the denomination to which I belong: the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.  Torn by bitter internal strife, its membership is shrinking and aging, many of its most important institutions are nearing financial disaster, and it […]

Since I spend more time reading than just about anything else (although lately blogging and grading papers seem to be giving books a run for the money) it’s hard to step back and think about which books really matter.  Perhaps if I could answer that question more clearly I would spend less time with books; […]

Some months ago, I wrote about Milton’s Areopagitica: “Where there is much desire to learn,” wrote Milton, “there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”  For Milton—and I think he was right—the Truth wasn’t something we inherited and had to coddle; […]

The world is still arguing about what was or what was not accomplished at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington this week. But one thing should be clear: for better or for worse, the United States remains the world’s leading power.  The American century has not come to an end.This was supposed to be the […]

As the 47 world leaders prepared to return home from the Washington ‘loose nukes’ summit, there were two leading schools of thought about what it accomplished.  One, exemplified by Joseph Cirincione at The Daily Beast, hailed the summit as the beginning of the end of the Strangelovian era of nuclear terror.  “Calculated subtlety and strategic […]

It was 149 years ago today that deeply misguided Confederate hotheads rejoiced as they began the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.  The Confederate cabinet in Montgomery had determined on the attack, overriding the prescient advice of Secretary of State Robert Toombs that to fire the first shot “will lose us every friend at […]

It appears that the Episcopal Church is beginning at long last to take evangelism seriously.  Over at the very useful news source RNS, there are not only the usual stories about evangelicals holding mass meetings and preaching to tens of thousands of people.  Evangelism is, after all, not just a question of Rick Warren preaching […]

Last week I wrote about the standpoint, the place from which you look out on the world.  I described my own standpoint, growing up in the American south, the outskirts of London and a New England boarding school (or, as I once described it to a group of students in a religious school in Pakistan, […]

OK, you may be saying.  Maybe Mead is right that the One Big Treaty approach to climate change is a non-starter.  And maybe he’s right that the various bills working their way through Congress aren’t going to amount to all that much either.  And, just possibly he’s right that the two Green Princes, Al Gore […]