The health care win has given the President his mojo back at home, but things overseas are still looking grim.  We are neglecting or quarreling with our friends and reaching out to our enemies — but neither policy is yielding much in the way of results.The latest case is Canada; on a visit to Ottawa […]

On Thursday, March 25, the newspapers announced on their front pages a U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement. A slow news day, maybe, I thought. This sort of thing would have deserved front page coverage before 1991; now it may still, but that’s not so evident. During the Cold War, strategic arms control was bound up with […]

I was on a Council on Foreign Relations conference call Friday with a group of religious leaders and scholars from around the country.  The call was on the record; when it’s available I’ll provide a link for those of you who want to listen to it.  The subject was timely: what’s happening with evangelicals in […]

Does money buy happiness?  This is one of humanity’s most pressing questions, and for some time I’ve wanted to do an in-depth, long-term study to resolve this one way or the other.  I think the empirical method is best, and like all great scientists who are also humanitarians, I would first test it on myself.  […]

The Obama administration seems to have significantly stepped up its demands on Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  This at least is the takeaway from a story in Ha’aretz, a moderately dovish Israeli newspaper.  The more conservative Jerusalem Post is basically saying the same thing; Washington is pressing Netanyahu for answers by Saturday to a list […]

One of the most dangerous and most common mistakes people make about the Middle East is to believe that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is just around the corner. This is an easy mistake to make; peace is such a good idea, who could be against it?  After all, it’s very easy to see […]

The blue social model posted a big win today as President Obama signed the Senate’s health care bill into law .  I think it’s a bad bill that locks the United States more tightly into a medical system that is unsustainable in the medium term, and it is grossly unfair to the young.  But extending […]

Seven years ago this week the first bombs were falling in Iraq and the war was breaking out, a war that caused untold suffering in Iraq, led to waves of anti-American feeling around the world, polarized politics in the United States, broke the administration of George W. Bush, and contributed to one of the most […]

This week I’ve been re-reading William R. Hutchison’s Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions.  It’s a great book about a vital subject that too many people know nothing about.Americans, even many American historians, don’t generally know very much about the history of our country.  This is partly because we’ve stopped teaching […]

As some have noticed, blogging has been slow here at the stately Mead manor the last few days.  I got in late yesterday from Lithuania, and today I somehow just didn’t have much to say.  Tonight was also a culture night; I had tickets to Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera. The singing was fantastic; the […]