The climate conference in Cancun was a turning point for the world’s greens.  There were two possible outcomes.  One was a total political meltdown in Cancun that would have been hideously embarrassing in the short run but that in the long term would have cleared the way for more hopeful approaches to carbon issues.  The […]

Iraq, the newest democracy in the Middle East, has turned down an invitation to attend today’s investiture ceremony for the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. It thus keeps company with a litany of repressive governments that have declined invitations to the ceremony, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Saudi […]

America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth.  Figuring out why […]

On November 28, 2010, the National Catholic Reporter, the banner journal of liberal Catholicism, published a lengthy excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church, by Father Charles Curran. As the NCR editorial on that date put it, Curran “will forever drag a footnote along with him”, no matter what […]

The global financial crisis could be heading to a blue state near you: that is the latest grim news from the New York Times:  “Mounting Debts by States Stoke Fears of Crisis.”  Normally a cheerleader for the free spending (in bluespeak, compassionate) policies of the public sector union dominated, high tax, high cost states like […]

On November 13 of this year, a group of shoppers in the food court of the Seaway mall in Welland, Ontario got the shock of their lives — in a nice way.As you can see in this video, a choir disguised as average shoppers burst into the Hallelujah Chorus, giving a stirring performance that has […]

A few days before Thanksgiving The New York Times carried a brief report about a pre-holiday interfaith breakfast in Westchester County, the affluent suburban area just north of New York City. It was convened by Rabbi Mark Sameth, known as “the country-and-western rabbi”, and the Reverend Steven Phillips, a Methodist described as “a sort of […]

What a difference a year makes.  Last year at this time, the Great Green Delusion — that the United Nations process could deliver a treaty that would stop global warming dead in its tracks — was the hottest idea in town.  Those who dissented were scorned and despised; the environmental movement and its army of […]

As World War Two broke out in Poland, WH Auden wrote about the despair of watching “the clever hopes expire/of a low, dishonest decade.” We are not yet at that pass, but Auden’s poem bears re-reading by anybody trying to read the signs of our increasingly dark and troubled times.There are times when the ideas […]

On November 13, 2010, there were two stories about religion, separated by four pages, in The New York Times. The first, filed by Laurie Goodstein (who reports regularly on religion), dealt with a conference of Roman Catholic bishops on procedures of exorcism. The other story, by Mark Oppenheimer (another regular Times reporter), told of an […]