General News

Santa Says Give Your Children Squeeze Hugs

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It was one of those cold, grey December days that makes me happy that I work from home. Ordinarily, it would have been a day when I made myself a hot cup of coffee or cocoa and snuggled under the covers with a good book or magazine. But, not on this particular day. This was a day when I had to get up and out, cold or not, and buy a gift that I needed to get in the mail if there was any hope of it arriving at its destination before Christmas. The things we do for love.

Culture

Don’t Make A Mystic into a Martyr: Fethullah Gülen as Peacebuilder

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I can’t speak to the causes of the recent failed military coup in Turkey—although there is certainly precedent for coups in the history of the Turkish Republic (1960, 1971, 1980). But I can speak to the accusations by journalist Mustafa Akyol and the Turkish government that an imam living an ascetic life of prayer and teaching in a Pennsylvania retreat center was somehow “behind” the most recent military uprising: they’re preposterous.

General News

The Obama Doctrine and the Limits of Violent Rebellion

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I say and say again that the Obama doctrine of foreign policy is just peace pragmatism. I know that President Obama eschews the notion that there is a theory or a doctrine that provides a structure for his foreign policy and lends it coherence. He sees a messy and unpredictable world in more detail than most ordinary people. He knows that each situation is unique, that as commander-in-chief of the largest, most powerful military of the most powerful nation on earth, he cannot be constrained by the contours of abstract theory. The most he is willing to say regarding a defined doctrine is: Don’t do stupid stuff.

General News

Cops of the Pacific? The U.S. Military’s Role in Asia in the Age of Trump

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Despite the attention being given to America’s roiling wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, crucial decisions about the global role of U.S. military power may be made in a region where, as yet, there are no hot wars: Asia. Donald Trump will arrive in the Oval Office in January at a moment when Pentagon preparations for a future U.S.-Japan-South Korean triangular military alliance, long in the planning stages, may have reached a crucial make-or-break moment. Whether those plans go forward and how the president-elect responds to them could help shape our world in crucial ways into the distant future.

Buddhism

Pew Report on Religion and Education Around the World

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (Dec. 13, 2016) – Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling, according to a Pew Research Center global demographic study that shows wide disparities in average educational levels among religious groups.

Environment

Drowning the World in Oil : Trump’s Carbon-Obsessed Energy Policy and the Planetary Nightmare to Come

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Scroll through Donald Trump’s campaign promises or listen to his speeches and you could easily conclude that his energy policy consists of little more than a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies: lift environmental restrictions on oil and natural gas extraction, build the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, open more federal lands to drilling, withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan, revive the coal mining industry, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. In fact, many of his proposals have simply been lifted straight from the talking points of top energy industry officials and their lavishly financed allies in Congress.

General News

Taking On Trump

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There is only one way that I can see Trump succeeding with his outrageous efforts—such as his Cabinet nominations–to turn back the clock to the 50’s, or further: if most of us who supported the Bernie movement of 2015-2016 shut up, take no action, and allow this pathological liar to do what he wants to do without any serious resistance.

General News

Kenneth Stern's Letter to the House on the Antisemitism Awareness Act

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I write as the lead author of the EUMC’s “Working Definition on Antisemitism,” to encourage you not to move “The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016,” which essentially incorporates that definition into law for a purpose that is both unconstitutional and unwise. If the definition is so enshrined, it will actually harm Jewish students and have a toxic effect on the academy.

Politics & Society

Indifference to Evil: Please Act Now!

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If a few years down the road a young person who knows and respects you were to rise from the shambles of democracy and heaped-up havoc wreaked by the Monkey King in the White House and ask what you did to stop him, would you be ashamed to answer? I’ll let Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel say it:
There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.