Wikileaks: Inside the Halls of Power
“There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.” Whether you agree with Wikileaks for releasing a quarter of a million secret, confidential, or “for official use only” U.S. embassy cables, their availability on the web (http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/) offers unprecedented understanding for anyone who wants to know what world leaders, their foreign policy advisers, and their diplomats are really thinking, saying, and doing amongst themselves regarding poignant international issues, actors, events, decisions, and futures. Read more
God of All Things?
Speaking at a Christian Men’s Breakfast fellowship in October, I suggested that the deeper issue surrounding the widespread political disillusionment in America today is a religious issue. Across the country, we have been experiencing the inadequacy of an emerging new idolatry: the politicization of all of American life. For several decades, I said, there’s been an increasing drive for us to turn to the instrumentality of the state, with its apparatus of law and politics, as an institution for solving all of our public problems. Read more
Change Agents
Selected ideas surrounding the growingly influential Muslim reform movement from five Muslim thinkers. I want to thank The Christian Century for commissioning this article well before the topic was noted by the American grassroots.
Published in The Christian Century (Aug. 9, 2005). Updated for the debut issue of the Muslim Public Affairs Journal (January, 2006). Also published online at Middle East Window.
Read the article here
IR & Theory
This is the first in a series of articles at the International Relations 101 section of the website, on “understanding international relations and foreign policy decision making.” These articles seek to make this complex, multi-dimensional arena accessible to people outside the halls of power. The series also pulls duty as a necessary backdrop for understanding the wisdom-based alternative approaches to the field that are being developed by The Wisdom Project.
Read the article here
Taliban Neighbors
How do you serve as a Christian in a hostile region, where violence has become a norm, where the news for you is rarely encouraging, where you’re held down economically, socially, and politically, and where traveling just from one place to another may make you the subject of a kidnapping? Bishop Rumalshah of the Church of Pakistan has had to find a way.
A slightly shorter version of this essay was published in The Christian Century, Jan. 13, 2009.
Read the essay here
Truth about ‘The Mosque at Ground Zero’
Being covered up on a demanding writing deadline during the weeks this firestorm was brewing, I decided to give this controversy a miss. But church, friends, media obfuscation, and a conference call with Daisy Khan indicated that I needed to find the time. I did. Here are the plain facts in plain English, in the first half of the article. In the second half I face a huge issue at the heart of the controversy that has been ignored by media and pundits alike: why law and rights, as good as they may be, are the wrong organizing principle for helping to heal our country’s still deep and open 9/11 wound. I suggest an alternative way ahead. (Note: the second half, “What would wisdom do?”, was added to the article a week after the first half was published.)
Read the article here
Realism & Idealism
This is the second in a series of articles at the International Relations 101 section of the website, on “understanding international relations and foreign policy decision making.” These articles seek to make this complex, multi-dimensional arena accessible to people outside the halls of power. The series also pulls duty as a necessary backdrop for understanding the wisdom-based alternative approaches to the field that are being developed by The Wisdom Project.
Read the article here
Christopher Hitchens
Isn’t the outspoken atheist and essayist Christopher Hitchens also a man of faith?
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