Back In The Saddle

After a rough week of paper grading, family visits and writing capsule reviews for Foreign Affairs, I’m getting back to an ambitious blogging schedule.  I’m working on a post about war with Iran that should be up by morning, planning a look at the state of the climate change movement following Al Gore’s typically unreflective and hectoring op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times, and drafting a response to some readers who really, really didn’t like my thoughts on the inconvenient truth that it is and always has been overwhelmingly gentile public opinion rather than insidious Jewish pressure that drives American policy toward the Jewish state.  There are a few more posts up my sleeve (if that is the right way to put it) about subjects ranging from the virtues of The Communist Manifesto to the theological blind spot that affects both liberal and evangelical Protestant thought in the United States.

Thanks to everyone who is taking the time to follow these posts.  The blog is still less than six months old and I’m still feeling my way into the form, but it’s been a terrific experience to do this in such interesting company.

And for those of you who are dying for something to read in the meantime, here are a few suggestions:

• Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch has a piece in the new Foreign Affairs asking whether President Obama really cares about human rights.  A Wilsonian attacking Obama for Jeffersonian caution and pragmatism?  Somebody should write about this: oh, somebody already has.

• Josiah Strong’s Our Country, one of the big missionary and publishing hits from the late nineteenth century, is now available from Google books.  I teach this book in my religion and foreign policy class at Yale; it never fails to blow the students’ minds — and mine.

• Another book we’ve been reading at Yale is Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity.  This is a modern classic and it will change the way you think about American politics.  (At least, it did that for me!)

• Finally, my capsule reviews  are up in the new March/April Foreign Affairs.  It was an unusually rich haul of books for this issue; Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 is going to be a classic.