Israel was established as both a democratic and a Jewish state. Both qualities continue to be real enough. But there have been increasing tensions between these two definitions of the state, and some (in Israel and outside it) have questioned whether there is not an inherent contradiction that cannot be resolved—Israel can be one or […]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? asked the Roman satirist Juvenal: Who will watch the guards?  In our society, we have another question to ask:  Who will reform the reformers?As the country sweltered under the hottest three months since record keeping began, as the gushing oil spill in the Gulf riveted the country’s attention on the environment […]

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and symbolic (though in actuality rather powerless) leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, is by all accounts a very pleasant individual.  He has been trying valiantly to keep within the sprawling Anglican fold, estimated to be between 70-80 million adherents worldwide, the progressives and traditionalists who have been in […]

In spite of what some conspiracy-minded critics on the right think, mainstream journalists like Time’s Joe Klein do not often agree with Fidel Castro.  That both Klein and Castro think the chances of war between the United States and Iran have increased recently is worth noting.  I happen to think they are right.The problem is […]

A Chinese sage defined a wise person as one who sees things together which others see as apart. Writing a blog implies the presumption of at least a measure of wisdom. So here we go:In an earlier effusion of wisdom, in reference to conflicts between secularist elites and religious voters, I compared the Supreme Court […]

On June 27, 2010, Belgian police raided the offices of the Roman Catholic  Bishops’ Conference in Brussels while a meeting of that organization was going on. The police was looking for evidence of cover-ups of crimes of child abuse by members of the clergy. While a search of the premises was undertaken, a group of […]

As the reports from Dutch and British watchdog panels came in last week, greens hailed what they see as a vindication of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit and the partial rehabilitation of the IPCC, but they are wrong.  As usual, the greens (and many of their critics) are missing the point.The Big Green Lie […]

The disintegration of the world’s third largest Christian ecclesiastical community marches on.  (The Roman Catholics with more than a billion members and the 300 million member Greek Orthodox communions are the two largest; the Pentecostal and charismatic movement worldwide is larger than the Greek Orthodox community but is not organized into a single group of […]

As regular readers of this space know, I was in London last week and took the opportunity to visit some of the sites associated with some of the important thinkers and writers who shaped the modern world.  I visited the tomb of one of the Founding Fathers of the Blogosphere,  Joseph Addison, in Poet’s Corner […]

In recent posts I’ve been hinting at new developments at The American Interest Online; I’m happy to share the first of these with you today.Peter Berger, a renowned sociologist, widely considered the world’s leading scholar on the role of religion in the contemporary world and one of the great socially engaged intellectuals of our time, […]