Religion Dispatches
…are nothing less than attacks on those values that are the pillars of our republic and the guarantors of our freedom. They erode our national well being. Those who commit these crimes do so fully intending to tear at the too-often frayed threads of diversity that bind us together and make us strong. They seek to divide and conquer. They seek to tear us apart from within, pitting American against American, fomenting violence and civil discord. Eve…
Read More…ng dictators of a largely secular cast; Tunisia and Egypt were not Islamic Republics, Yemen was a mess to begin with but not particularly ideologically Islamic—although religiously conservative—and Syria was dominated by a secular Ba’ath party. Yet, as I wrote, the New York Times, America’s leading newspaper, irresponsibly confused religiosity with a lack of receptivity to democracy. (Then again, if you’re the majority, of course you’d support dem…
Read More…han other nations. Note that “different” is the word that our politicians, Republican and Democrat, use to mean distinctly better than other peoples. And what an amazing level of self-deception that is, say the world’s other peoples, shaking their heads over white America’s delusional self-love. I believe that what most dismays international observers of today’s America—and I refer to people who want to admire our country more than they now do—is…
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…ans, who provide an elusive counterpoint to the early history of the Roman Republic. The nearest northern neighbors to Rome, Etruscans are associated with the mountainous interior of the storied western coast of Italy, up to what is still called Tuscany today. Some of the earliest Roman kings were Etruscan, and yet later, when Rome undertook her great campaigns that resulted in the peninsula, she singled out the Etruscans for special censure. Thre…
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…phraim was tonsured as a monk in 1947 on Mount Athos, an isolated monastic republic in the Aegean which forbids not only women, but even cows, from landing on its shores. He left Athos in 1979 when he went to Canada for medical treatment. From there, he came to the United States, which is (as with so many stories) where it gets weird. Traveling through the Greek-American communities of the early 1980s, Ephraim found what through other eyes might h…
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…lamist monarchy, i.e., Saudi Arabia, and a violent, authoritarian Islamist republic, Iran; if only, I often wish, there was some global agency with the moral clout to call for a time-out, and to see it through. To insulate the Muslim world from both these regimes. Their rhetoric infects the wider region; the cover of the New York Times suggests as much: now, whether they like it or not, all Sunni and Shia have to take sides. Or have sides taken fo…
Read More…he people get to vote on everything), but instead live in a representative republic (where we elect and appoint people to set laws and standards for us), this red herring is especially pernicious. As we have seen from the recent Republican presidential candidate debates, if we actually let the people vote on what rights and privileges other citizens would enjoy, the people might implement a mandatory death penalty (possibly even for lessler infrac…
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…e course of the year, nor did they waver as testimony after testimony from Republican officials (whose careers in the party are now effectively over) piled up, forming a mountain of damning evidence against the former President. With a Republican-led House looming over the January 6th committee, the panel has published an 845-page-long report, summing up their investigations. The report serves as the foundation for their criminal referral of Trump…
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…a fair number of African Americans, Hispanics, and Muslims who once voted Republican. They no longer do—not because they disagree with the Republican Party, but because they feel it has no room for them. It seems opposed to their presence in America. A good number in the Muslim-majority world feel the same way about the place of Islam in the world: there is no room for it. It isn’t that these Muslims don’t want democracy, or good relations. It is…
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…ry” lies with neoliberal capitalism are being heard as far as the People’s Republic of China. Not without reason, the 20th century’s question of why free markets has been replaced, especially in the developing world, with how to get there. But last year’s collapse is one more reminder that the market won’t be our brother’s or our sister’s keeper for us. The shock waves of harm spread through global markets in ways that “love thy neighbor” doesn’t…
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