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  • The Kingdom0

    On one level, events of late have had a certain air of déjà vu for me. As a young man I followed the events leading up to the decision to impeach President Nixon. The story line was a bit like a John Le Carré spy novel, involving as it did money payoffs by courier, a

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  • ​Playing the Game0

    Sekulow [Jay Sekulow, founder of the American Center for Law and Justice, and now an attorney for President Trump] kept bringing cases to the Court. . . but in the 1999-2000 term he discovered the limit of his free speech arguments. The case arose out of one of the central rituals of Texas life—the high

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  • ​The Quiet Revolution0

    I was born in a place where the atmosphere had no oxygen. Where organized religion was, and still is, the substitute for air, water, food, and the social contract. Lebanon, my birthplace, is a country like no other: a black hole of multiple religions and sects coalescing into a hot pot, which is at a

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  • ​A Matter of Honor0

    It was one of those “by invitation only” events. A special, select group alone could attend: military people, journalists, and a few notables. However, a large crowd of the unchosen gathered outside the walls, making its presence known with shouts of “Death to the Jew!” and “Death to Judas!” The mob numbered in the thousands,

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  • ​A Climate of Fear0

    Looking for a “hook,” an attention-grabbing story to use as an introduction for this essay, I found so many extreme weather events in 2017-2019 that I was at a loss for which one to pick. In their sheer destructiveness, they were all devastatingly similar. And the responses of the people who went through them were terrifyingly

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  • ​A Living Rebuke0

    As World War II was nearing its end, and the conundrum of an Eastern Europe “liberated” from Hitler by the Soviet Union was becoming a hot-button issue, Winston Churchill warned Soviet dictator Josef Stalin about the power of the Catholic Church in these countries. Without missing a beat, Stalin countered, “How many divisions does the

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