Conservative Cassandras are turning out to be empirically correct, even if one disagrees with their philosophy: once you legitimate same-sex marriage, you open the door to any number of other alternatives to marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

Social reform, asserted Confucius, begins with the rectification of names.I can think of one case where he’s unquestionably right: the use of the word ‘developed’ as applied to certain wealthy and industrialized countries mostly found in western Europe and North America, but sprinkled elsewhere throughout the world.  The widespread and unchallenged use of that word […]

As attentive readers have noticed, blogging has been slow here at Via Meadia since the end of the Christmas season.  Other commitments have pulled me away from posting as regularly here as I like.  This is about to change and I hope to return to my normal pace in the next week.Thanks to all of […]

Radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr returned to Iraq from three years of exile in Iran last week to a rapturous welcome, riding a wave of popularity and adulation attributable not only to his storied family history and his closeness to the poor urban Shi‘a masses but also to his role as kingmaker in Iraq’s new […]

I occasionally pick up The Jerusalem Post at the famous out-of-town newspaper kiosk on Harvard Square (for ongoing news about the Middle East I rely on its very informative sister publication The Jerusalem Report). In the current international edition my attention was immediately grabbed by a big advertisement on the very first page of the […]

The world is just dipping its toes, so to speak, in the new year, and 2011 is already shaping up as a dangerous time.  Europe hasn’t solved its financial crisis; the US is vulnerable to state and local financial crises that could erupt without warning; China’s export-oriented growth model is unlikely to yield a second […]

As a kid I always had some trouble understanding the business about the three wise men. Gold always comes in handy so I could see why you would bring gold to a baby — but what on earth were frankincense and myrrh and why would anybody give them to a child? I figured myrrh might […]

Barely nine months have passed since Hungary’s new Parliament met—and since then the words and deeds of the party and new government have turned the political life and the workings of the state and the economy upside down. We are constantly perplexed; we have not even recovered from our astonishment at yesterday’s political measure when […]

As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over my short life as a writer on religious matters and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write […]

It helps if one knows what one’s mission is in life. I am beginning to think that my mission, at least in my new life as a blogger, is to take two separate stories in The New York Times and comment on them together. In the issue of December 18, 2010 there are two stories […]