Campus Crusade for Christ will henceforth be known as “Cru”, its leaders have announced.  “Crusade” and “jihad” are very similar words.  Both can mean a holy war against the infidel; both can mean a struggle against social evil.  But whenever Christians talk about crusades, and whenever Muslims bring up jihad, hackles rise.Campus Crusade for Christ, […]

Lebanon’s Health Minister, Ali Hasan Khalil, has called on his fellow Muslims throughout the Middle East to take steps to protect the region’s Christian minority from persecution and violence.  “The responsibility to preserve the Christians of the East is not the responsibility of Christians and their leaders only, but an Islamic humanitarian responsibility as well,” […]

South Carolina is my native state and Walmart is my favorite store, but color me puzzled by the news that a couple in Anderson, South Carolina found that  the face of Jesus had mysteriously appeared on their receipt from the local Walmart.Retail competition must be tougher than I thought; I wonder what they give you […]

My grandparents lived in Florence, South Carolina.  We had our claim to literary glory; Henry Timrod, often (and especially in Florence) called the “poet laureate of the Confederacy,” had lived there. And of course there’s the crater from the time the Air Force dropped an atom bomb on the town.But even in Florence SC they’ll […]

The recent Pew Global Attitudes Project survey found that almost no one in the Muslim Middle East has anything nice to say about Jews.Researchers found that the percentage expressing “favorable views” about Jews was uniformly low: Egypt, 2 percent; Jordan, 2 percent; Pakistan, 2 percent; Lebanon, 3 percent; Palestine, 4 percent; Turkey, 4 percent.Repeat until […]

Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times,  thinks too many people are writing books and we need to cut back.  I’ve long thought the same thing; if fewer books were published and the books that were published were better, the world would be a more productive and more learned place.  Flannery O’Connor agreed; […]

Today brings to a close The American Interest‘s daily updates on Civil War events from 150 years ago.  We’ve taken the story one day at a time from Lincoln’s election through the Battle of Bull Run, providing news summaries of the news as it would have been known to readers of the leading American newspapers […]

The limitations of Bolivarian socialism, it seems, are at least as visible from South America as they are from glamorous Queens: the WSJ reports that recent appointments by leftist Peruvian president-elect Humala are market friendly economists.Like former Brazilian president Lula, Humala is a long time Latin leftie whose rhetoric can be anti-Yanqui and anti-capitalism.  But […]

Over a million people demonstrated across Syria after Friday prayers yesterday. Importantly, significant numbers of people turned out on the streets in Aleppo and Damascus. The smart money has always said that the Syrian revolution will ultimately turn on what happens in Syria’s two biggest cities — and that Damascus matters more than Aleppo.  The […]

One of the least surprising poll results in modern history comes from Gallup:   Americans’ top source of financial concern is, brace yourself,  “lack of money,” afflicting 17% of those polled.There are a few people around whose main financial problem is that they keep running out of sacks to store all their money in, but […]