It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close.  Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own:  “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing I […]

For all the attention it gets in the world today, Christmas is not that big of a deal in the Bible.  The New Revised Standard Version that I mostly use is 1270 pages long; about one half of one percent of this text deals with the Christmas story.(If you want to read the whole thing now, […]

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all!  We are having a tense morning at the ancestral Mead home today, jumping whenever the telephone rings.  There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the […]

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care at the ancestral Mead mansion; and as I settle down for a long winter’s rest I am taking a break from politics and war, sort of, to do some good old fashioned Yuletide blogging.In particular I want to blog about Christmas itself and what it means.  […]

Merry Christmas to those who feel so inclined and Season’s Greetings to the rest!Team Mead moves into holiday mode today; the halls are decked with holly and the wreath is on the door.We are celebrating the season by shifting focus; on Christmas Eve and all through the twelve days of Christmas to come, I’ll be […]

Scott Erwin, a former Team Mead associate, ditched his old friends at Team Mead and threw away a brilliant future as a lifetime Mead minion simply to chase after the illusory ‘prestige’ of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.  After several years of intensive study of the intellectual and theological links between Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln […]

Today as we observe the 30th anniversary of the Soviet move into Kabul, it’s useful to think about the concept of ‘blowback’: a term that originally referred to the unwanted consequences of covert action and is now often used to describe the ways in which foreign policy choices of the past come back to haunt […]

Today is not one of the great days in the history of American foreign policy. In fact it’s the 202nd anniversary of one of the stupidest things we ever did. On this day in 1807 a besotted Congress passed a law essentially banning all US foreign trade at the request of President Thomas Jefferson. It […]

The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (work will make you free) sign over the main gate of the original Auschwitz camp has, it appears this morning, been found in Poland.  It had been reported stolen over the weekend.  As far as police have determined at this point, the thieves were thinking about money, not politics.  They […]

The Cluster of Copenhagen, the chaotic and orgiastic assembly of the representatives of 192 countries plus uncountable throngs of NGO leaders and miscellaneous activists, is, as Les Gelb notes this morning over at The Daily Beast, a window into the future.  In many ways, it’s not a very nice future.In the first two posts, I […]