The filing supports survivors of the assault, relatives of those killed, and civilians still affected by Hamas’ ongoing violence. The post 25 US states file appeal against radical Muslim groups for supporting Hamas appeared first on World Israel News.

The filing supports survivors of the assault, relatives of those killed, and civilians still affected by Hamas’ ongoing violence. The post 25 US states file appeal against radical Muslim groups for supporting Hamas appeared first on World Israel News.

The SGBL bank denied the claim, and associates described Sehanoui as an “outspoken Zionist.” The post US Diplomat Morgan Ortagus’ post-divorce boyfriend is chairman of bank with alleged Hezbollah ties appeared first on World Israel News.

The SGBL bank denied the claim, and associates described Sehanoui as an “outspoken Zionist.” The post US Diplomat Morgan Ortagus’ post-divorce boyfriend is chairman of bank with alleged Hezbollah ties appeared first on World Israel News.

As part of its expanded eastern security barrier, Israel’s Ministry of Defense has cleared hundreds of decades-old anti-tank mines along the Jordanian border to reinforce long-term border control. The post WATCH: Israel dismantles old minefields along Jordanian border appeared first on World Israel News.

As part of its expanded eastern security barrier, Israel’s Ministry of Defense has cleared hundreds of decades-old anti-tank mines along the Jordanian border to reinforce long-term border control. The post WATCH: Israel dismantles old minefields along Jordanian border appeared first on World Israel News.

Israel and Samoa, which have maintained bilateral ties since 1972, have strong, growing relations marked by cooperation in health, technology, agriculture, and energy. The post Samoa to inaugurate embassy in Jerusalem this year appeared first on World Israel News.

Israel and Samoa, which have maintained bilateral ties since 1972, have strong, growing relations marked by cooperation in health, technology, agriculture, and energy. The post Samoa to inaugurate embassy in Jerusalem this year appeared first on World Israel News.

In November, Lang travelled to Dearborn, Michigan, where he attempted to burn a Quran, the central religious text in Islam, and slapped bacon on it. The post Pardoned Jan. 6 protester throws chocolate coins, Nazi salute during anti-AIPAC demonstration in DC appeared first on World Israel News.

In November, Lang travelled to Dearborn, Michigan, where he attempted to burn a Quran, the central religious text in Islam, and slapped bacon on it. The post Pardoned Jan. 6 protester throws chocolate coins, Nazi salute during anti-AIPAC demonstration in DC appeared first on World Israel News.

Tehran University Professor Foad Izadi said Iran should take the fight to the Western Hemisphere, suggesting Tehran could help turn Latin America into a strategic threat zone for the United States. The post WATCH: Iranian professor suggests Tehran arm Latin America to pressure US appeared first on World Israel News.

Tehran University Professor Foad Izadi said Iran should take the fight to the Western Hemisphere, suggesting Tehran could help turn Latin America into a strategic threat zone for the United States. The post WATCH: Iranian professor suggests Tehran arm Latin America to pressure US appeared first on World Israel News.

Of 729 NU-Q graduates from 2014 to 2025, approximately 21 percent bear surnames from the Al-Thani royal family or 11 other elite Qatari dynasties. The post Qatar’s elite pipeline at Northwestern – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

Of 729 NU-Q graduates from 2014 to 2025, approximately 21 percent bear surnames from the Al-Thani royal family or 11 other elite Qatari dynasties. The post Qatar’s elite pipeline at Northwestern – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

A campaign for office starts with finding the right candidate. Zohran Mamdani combines world-historic “rizz” with deep socialist ideological commitment. But his mayoral campaign won because it successfully introduced that candidate — and the political vision he embodies — to millions through a mass field operation alongside a brilliant, funny, and moving communications operation. One

President Donald Trump issued a threat against Iran should they kill unarmed protesters, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed Israel’s support for the Iranian people. The post Iranian president admits to losing control over protests appeared first on World Israel News.

President Donald Trump issued a threat against Iran should they kill unarmed protesters, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed Israel’s support for the Iranian people. The post Iranian president admits to losing control over protests appeared first on World Israel News.

During a visit to the Negev with Israel’s top security and law-enforcement officials, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the start of a national operation aimed at restoring law and order. The post WATCH: Netanyahu launches national push to reclaim the Negev appeared first on World Israel News.

During a visit to the Negev with Israel’s top security and law-enforcement officials, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the start of a national operation aimed at restoring law and order. The post WATCH: Netanyahu launches national push to reclaim the Negev appeared first on World Israel News.

Netanyahu briefed Modi on the implementation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, while Modi reaffirmed India’s support for efforts toward a just and durable peace in the region. The post Netanyahu, Modi discuss strengthening ties, Gaza peace plan appeared first on World Israel News.

Netanyahu briefed Modi on the implementation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, while Modi reaffirmed India’s support for efforts toward a just and durable peace in the region. The post Netanyahu, Modi discuss strengthening ties, Gaza peace plan appeared first on World Israel News.

Stephen Miller, President Trump’s Jewish deputy chief of staff and architect of Trump’s agenda, is the administration’s voice on American foreign policy. The post What Became of America’s “Peace President”? Who’s Behind American Foreign Policy? appeared first on Global Research.

Dear readers, For independent media like Global Research, January sets the tone for the year ahead — determining what projects we can take on and whether we can continue the work we already do. Our independence is only sustainable because … The post Global Research Fundraiser — Start the Year Informed. appeared first on Global Research.

Currently, approximately 6,000 soldiers receive funding for medical cannabis, with about 3,500 new patients added over the past two years. The post Knesset examines growing use of medical cannabis among PTSD-afflicted soldiers appeared first on World Israel News.

Currently, approximately 6,000 soldiers receive funding for medical cannabis, with about 3,500 new patients added over the past two years. The post Knesset examines growing use of medical cannabis among PTSD-afflicted soldiers appeared first on World Israel News.

The United States has seized two sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela after a weeks-long pursuit in the North Atlantic and another interdicted in the Caribbean. The post WATCH: US seizes two sanctioned oil tankers days after Maduro arrest appeared first on World Israel News.

The United States has seized two sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela after a weeks-long pursuit in the North Atlantic and another interdicted in the Caribbean. The post WATCH: US seizes two sanctioned oil tankers days after Maduro arrest appeared first on World Israel News.

Executive Summary: The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is quietly rewriting the tempo of its most routine far-seas mission (Global Times, September 30, 2024). Since December 2008, Gulf of Aden escort deployments have been among the PLAN’s most predictable overseas operations, typically lasting four to six months per rotation (People’s Daily, December 25, 2018). That The post Near-Seas Force Locking Reshapes Gulf of Aden Naval Missions appeared first on Jamestown.

Regardless of whoever comes out on top in this rivalry, the US still wins since they’re both NATO members, but a NATO-Russian Non-Aggression Pact should follow in any case for managing tensions. * The Wall Street Journal detailed “Germany’s … The post Germany Is Competing with Poland to Lead Russia’s Containment appeared first on Global Research.

Donald Trump  wants to seize Venezuela’s oil wealth. And now he wants to Annex Greenland. He has politely intimated that he wants to Annex Canada as the 51st State. And that’s no joking matter.  . It’s  “The Kidnapping of Countries” … The post Video: “The Kidnapping of Countries”. Who Is Next appeared first on Global Research.

To be afraid of war means the world is ready to accept the U.S. domination and this would not be good for anyone except for American politicians, corporations and citizens. The post President Donald Trump Has Thrown a Gauntlet to Russia and China appeared first on Global Research.

Authorities charge arsonist arrested for Christmas Day attack on Melbourne-area rabbi's car with 18 counts of theft and arson. The post Arsonist who torched Melbourne rabbi’s car with Chanukah display arrested appeared first on World Israel News.

Authorities charge arsonist arrested for Christmas Day attack on Melbourne-area rabbi's car with 18 counts of theft and arson. The post Arsonist who torched Melbourne rabbi’s car with Chanukah display arrested appeared first on World Israel News.

The helping hand that Pakistan is lending to Turkiye in Libya, which follows that which it recently lent in Somalia and half a decade earlier in Azerbaijan, could lead to them working together in Kazakhstan next as that country risks … The post Pakistan is Playing Second Fiddle to Turkiye in Afro-Eurasian Security appeared first on Global Research.

The US has a long history of military intervention in Latin America, but never before has it been so brazen

There is one news website — founded in 2001 by an award-winning Canadian economist — that would never be subsidized by the Canadian Government. The post The Most Censored News Website in Canada appeared first on Global Research.

Israel's top brass estimates that while Iran's leadership is struggling to put down the ongoing protests, the growing dissident movement does not yet have the means to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The post Iranian regime likely to survive unrest, Israeli intelligence believes appeared first on World Israel News.

Israel's top brass estimates that while Iran's leadership is struggling to put down the ongoing protests, the growing dissident movement does not yet have the means to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The post Iranian regime likely to survive unrest, Israeli intelligence believes appeared first on World Israel News.

The US invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro were flagrant violations of the UN Charter and international law. They involved the use of force, which is prohibited by the UN Charter. The US attack cannot be justified … The post The U.S. President Violated the U.N. Charter and International Law By Kidnapping Maduro. appeared first on Global Research.

Iranian government claims it captured an agent working on behalf of Israel's Mossad to operate among anti-regime demonstrators, with a second alleged Mossad agent executed for espionage. The post Iran executes alleged Mossad spy, says it captured Israeli agent promoting protests appeared first on World Israel News.

Iranian government claims it captured an agent working on behalf of Israel's Mossad to operate among anti-regime demonstrators, with a second alleged Mossad agent executed for espionage. The post Iran executes alleged Mossad spy, says it captured Israeli agent promoting protests appeared first on World Israel News.

On December 17, Donald Trump spoke to reporters with refreshing candor, for a US president, about the motives behind his bellicose policy in Venezuela. Referring to the ousting of US oil companies dating from 1976, he bluntly declared, “[We wanted] all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.” Venezuela’s

Britain's national broadcaster faces criticism after it aired a feature focusing on the Kindertransport evacuation of Jewish children that did not mention Jews. The post BBC apologizes for purging Holocaust story of references to Jews appeared first on World Israel News.

Britain's national broadcaster faces criticism after it aired a feature focusing on the Kindertransport evacuation of Jewish children that did not mention Jews. The post BBC apologizes for purging Holocaust story of references to Jews appeared first on World Israel News.

Perhaps as early as this Friday, the Supreme Court will announce a ruling in the Trump administration’s tariff cases, Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections. The takeaway from the oral argument back in November was clear: the administration is in trouble and headed for defeat. For many on the Left, such a

In the year leading up to the Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela, corporate actors who stand to benefit from United States–backed regime change in the country — including fossil fuel magnates, international creditors, and cryptocurrency firms — spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the Trump administration on Venezuela, including over their economic access to the

A new congressional research report has found that the vast majority of illegal synthetic drugs, like fentanyl and methamphetamine, come to the United States via Mexico and China, not Venezuela. The finding comes as the Trump administration continues to claim that Venezuela is a narcotics hotbed to help justify its military assault on the country. While

Amsterdam once stood as one of the world’s great capitals, the place from which large ships left to go as far off as the Americas and the islands of Indonesia to trade and conquer. There are reminders all over the city of that history, residues of its imperial past. But what grandeur exists now looks

President Trump Last Night on Air Force One: Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Iran and Greenland By Peter Koenig, January 06, 2026 According to a brief press conference on Air Force One from Florida to Washington, Sunday night, 4 January 2026, … The post Selected Articles: President Trump Last Night on Air Force One: Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Iran and Greenland appeared first on Global Research.

A Westmoreland County man is jailed without bond after state police say he walked into his former home on New Year’s Eve and fatally shot a volunteer firefighter who was eating dinner with the suspect’s estranged wife. Robert D. Naugle Jr., 30, is charged with criminal homicide in the Dec. 31, 2025 killing of James D. Thomas, 47, at a residence on Hugh Street in Hempfield Township. Authorities said the case jolts a community where ... Read more

An iPhone crash-detection alert directed officers to a late-night wreck in Olathe where a car slammed into a tree and caught fire, killing two people, police said Sunday. The notification led first responders to Northgate Street and East Harold Street around 10:40 p.m. Saturday, where firefighters extinguished the blaze and discovered the bodies inside the vehicle. Authorities say the case underscores how automated alerts can speed response times when bystanders don’t witness a crash or ... Read more

An 11-year-old girl was shot in the head Monday as her family’s car rolled out of the Delta View Apartments on Delta Fair Boulevard, a daytime attack that police say appeared random and left the child in critical but stable condition at a Bay Area hospital. Antioch police said the gunfire erupted around 12:30 p.m. as the family exited the parking lot. A round pierced the rear window, tore through a headrest and struck the ... Read more

A man armed with a machete killed his mother and grandparents inside a Piscataway home late Monday afternoon before charging at responding officers, who then fatally shot him, authorities said. Police were dispatched to a residence on River Road around 5:30 p.m. after a 911 call reported a person with a knife and threats of harm, officials said. Officials described the episode as an isolated family tragedy that unfolded in minutes and left four people ... Read more

… The post Un Mundo Entre Guerra y Moderación appeared first on Global Research.

During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, then-candidate Barack Obama found himself in the midst of a controversy over a sermon delivered by his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Our country had failed her people, especially minorities, and we should not sing “God Bless America,” he thundered. “No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s in the Bible!” After the Wright sermon was unearthed and caused a media firestorm, Obama was forced to distance himself from the radical preacher and ultimately leave his church. Distressingly, Wright’s religiously tinged anti-Americanism has only become more prevalent in contemporary politics—and not just on the Left. From theocratic Protestant nationalists to Roman Catholic integralists, increasing numbers of right-wing Christians are joining their progressive counterparts in denouncing this country and her political institutions. Revolution is in the atmosphere. At least on the extremes, it seems that Christians are experiencing a crisis of faith in America. Daniel Darling’s latest book, In Defense of Christian Patriotism, is a serious tonic for this troubled discourse. He blends a Chestertonian sensibility with a Baptist preacher’s commonsense reading of Scripture to provide a thoroughly convincing case that believers are called to love their country. Taking his case a step further, he also provides compelling reasons why Christians should feel a special sense of loyalty for the American Republic. In our age of doubt and discontent, this bold vindication of conservative wisdom deserves acclaim. To take one particular example, Darling’s treatment of the place of national flags in sanctuaries is representative of his general argument. Some Christians object to the presence of the star-spangled banner on the grounds that it is idolatrous to place it alongside the cross. But Darling argues this is misguided. “It’s true that Sunday mornings shouldn’t be a civic pep rallies for America,” he writes. “Still, a flag can serve as a reminder of the location in which God has called us to serve Him. Juxtaposed with a cross, it helps us put our love of God, love of our country, and love of our families into the proper order.” Darling does not mistake the nation—let alone the state—for the divine, but he does recognize its place in the contract of eternal society. For the most part, Darling trains his fire on progressive evangelicals and far-left mainliners who contend that America was never great in the first place. “If some people,” he writes, “are tempted toward a disordered love of country, I sense that in this generation, it’s far more common to recoil at any sense of loyalty to America.” The shoddy arguments and flawed scholarship of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Andrew Whitehead, and Samuel Perry (among others) have been ably deconstructed by others, but Darling does a fine job collating these critiques for readers who, by some blessed providence, have thus far avoided the toxic debate over “Christian nationalism.” Perhaps more interesting, though, are the moments when Darling takes time to defend his vision of Christian patriotism against right-wing ideologues. While he certainly acknowledges Christianity deserves a prominent place in the American public square, he harbors none of the ideologues’ illusions about the efficacy of political power to instill virtue or, much less, faith. The state can and should act as a moral guardian, informed by natural law and even certain biblical truths. But centralization and terror will not revive Christianity or the good life. As Darling puts it with some humor, “A government that can barely manage a post office or healthcare website is not equipped to make decisions about right and wrong belief.” In part, the reason Darling can be so clear-headed about the follies of this left- and right-wing Jacobinism is that he has a healthy skepticism about power without indulging in simple-minded libertarian clichés. “The American system hinges on the idea that the state tends to be a poor steward of individuals’ positive freedom and therefore it is wiser to diffuse power and disperse freedom widely among the citizenry,” he writes. At the same time, though, Darling urges Christians to remain engaged with politics. Indeed, he even asserts that Christian faith is an essential pillar of the political tradition of separated powers. Without the ballast of biblical wisdom, our constitutional arrangements are liable to drift away.  At the heart of all debates about patriotism—and other kinds of love—is a perennial question that has troubled Western thinkers since antiquity: How do we know if a thing is good? We might argue that a thing is good if it has endured over a long period of time; but this answer seems obviously flawed when we remember moral evils such as chattel slavery. Another possible argument is that we could know through divine revelation; the trouble, though, is that the Bible simply does not speak clearly to every single situation. We might turn to human reason for answers; but when we consider the distortions of ideology and sophistry, we remember that rationality is hardly the solid ground it might seem. If we cannot know if a thing is good, how could we know if it is lovable? Early in the book, Darling provides a more sophisticated answer that informs his entire argument. “Things are not good merely because they are familiar,” he writes. “But if we can’t see the good in the familiar, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to perceive the good that’s far away. Instead, we’ll love an abstraction made in our own image.” Along with a great chain of Western thinkers, from Augustine and Anselm to GK Chesterton and CS Lewis, Darling clearly understands that the particular is a kind of ladder up to the universal. By loving the things nearest to us—family, friends, parish, place—and expressing our gratitude for them, we can slowly ascend to a more comprehensive love of the whole of creation. To borrow a phrase from another estimable theologian, “love alone is credible.” To his great credit, Darling therefore spends the second half of the book discussing ways Christians can work to redeem the times and restore our country that go beyond politics. From recommitting to the local church to working for the renewal of schools and families, his program is not only sensible but an excellent reminder of the real substance of both American patriotism and Christian life.  Our job as individual Christians is not to defeat all evil and inaugurate God’s kingdom on earth—Christ already achieved our victory on the Cross. Similarly, the American Republic is not the entity that will bring salvation to all mankind. Our vocation, as both Christians and patriots, is far more manageable: we are called to love God and love our neighbors. As Russell Kirk put it in his short book The American Cause, “Love of the Republic shelters all our other loves. That love is worth some sacrifice.” Here in the United States, at least, we are fortunate to live in a regime that defends and even celebrates the love Christ commands. And for that reason alone, we should all be able to say, without reservation, “God bless America.”

A longtime Raleigh science teacher died after a man broke into her home early Saturday and attacked her while she was on the phone with 911, police said. Officers arrested 36-year-old Ryan Camacho shortly after the assault and charged him with murder and first-degree burglary. Welsh, 57, was rushed to a hospital from the 800 block of Clay Street and later died of her injuries. The killing rattled a tight-knit school community and revived questions ... Read more

… The post Bô Yin Râ: “The Specter of Freedom.” Part V appeared first on Global Research.

When China's Qing Emperor Daoguang ordered the destruction of opium stocks in the port of Canton (Guangzhou) in 1838, the British Empire declared war on China on the grounds that it was obstructing the "free flow" of commodity trade. The post Neocolonial Drug Trafficking and the British Empire’s Opium Wars. Today’s “Narco-States” and “The Laundering of Drug Money” appeared first on Global Research.

First published on June 24, 2024 All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version). To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click … The post British Imperialism and the Opium Wars: The Kuomintang’s Narco-State appeared first on Global Research.

The fundamental aim of the article is to present an alternative view and facts on the background of the military-political case of the „Vukovar operation“ in 1991 in the broader context of the internal and external brutal destruction of the … The post The First Post-Cold War “Humanitarian Intervention” − The Liberation of the Vukovar Concentration Camp in 1991 appeared first on Global Research.

The federal government on Tuesday defended a sweeping rewrite of childhood vaccine guidance that reduces the number of shots recommended for all kids, saying the change aligns the U.S. more closely with other developed countries. The move follows years of argument over why America’s schedule has been broader than many peers and arrives amid a fierce public health backlash. The update matters because it resets long-standing differences that shaped how U.S. families navigated pediatric care. ... Read more

A 75-year-old military veteran remained in a coma Tuesday after authorities say a DoorDash driver punched him during a confrontation about speeding on a residential street last week. The driver, identified by police as Ryan Turner, 40, has been charged with aggravated assault and released on bond while the investigation continues. The case has drawn wide attention in suburban Detroit, where neighbors say they are shaken by the sudden violence. Police described the incident as ... Read more

The leaders in the US and UK cannot expect to retain a position of world leadership. The post The US-UK War Machine: Partners in Looming Disaster appeared first on Global Research.

U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Republican who represented California’s rural 1st Congressional District since 2013, died suddenly Tuesday at age 65, his office and congressional leaders said. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed, and arrangements were pending. LaMalfa’s death removes a longtime conservative voice for Northern California and tightens the already narrow Republican majority in the U.S. House. Party leaders said the vacancy leaves Republicans with a slimmer working margin heading into a ... Read more

As the Epstein files continue to plague Donald Trump, the president has turned to a recycled adversary to divert attention away from his relationship with  Jeffrey Epstein?  In response to an ambush that left two Iowa National Guard troops … The post Trump’s Vengeance: Dozens of Strikes in Syria as the Epstein Files Threaten appeared first on Global Research.

Much of the conversation around addiction swings between two worldviews. On one side is the belief that addiction is a brain disease, that the addicted person’s brain compels them to continuously use drugs despite dire consequences. Much of this belief is derived from scientists studying rats in isolated conditions, offering the animals only cocaine as

While the secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is billed as a joint affair between Australia and the United States, it is nothing of the sort. The post Confronting Genocide with Civil Disobedience in Australia: The Pine Gap Protests and Gaza appeared first on Global Research.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been abducted by Delta Force and is already on U.S. soil. Many commentators have rushed to publish articles explaining what happened, or more accurately, how they interpret the latest developments. What has taken place constitutes … The post Nicolás Maduro in New York, China in the Crosshairs appeared first on Global Research.

Coming on top of the recent US aggression in Venezuela, the debate on the possibilities of annexation of Greenland by the USA, or gaining a much higher control, has become more intense. The US President Trump said on December 4, … The post Greenland – Annexation Debate and Militarization Ignore Real Need for Ecologically Protective Policies appeared first on Global Research.

The opposition of Jewish voters to Zohran Mamdani has been, and will continue to be, a flash point of commentary and conflict over the mayor. It reminds me a bit of how black voters were often the flash point of commentary and conflict over Bernie Sanders in 2016. In the last year, Michael Lange has

Executive Summary: Editor’s note: This is the third article in a four-part series. The first and second articles can be read here and here. The Communiqué from the fourth plenary session of the 20th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) central committee described the 14th Five-Year Plan period as a time in which the country’s “economic strength, The post CNP Part III: Growing CNP Drove Foreign Policy Shift appeared first on Jamestown.

Sovereignty has been undermined by the push for one world globalism. In the United States, hegemony is not an expression of American nationalism. The post The Peace President Goes to War appeared first on Global Research.

"Former senior Canadian intelligence officials say Canada needs to be on the lookout for campaigns aimed at destabilizing the country amid U.S. President Donald Trump's escalating 51st state threats." The post President Trump’s Ultimate Intent: The Annexation of Canada, The Annexation of Greenland, the Militarization of the Arctic. Militarization of the Western Hemisphere appeared first on Global Research.

Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have an enemy, and it’s not “climate deniers.” These authors acknowledge that the original Big Oil brand of climate denialism — which rejected the scientific fact that through the burning of fossil fuels humans emit carbon dioxide, which in turn warms the planet — is now less prevalent than a

The ritualistic shock that greets each new American military intervention in the 21st century has become almost comical. The post Why We Keep Being Shocked: Maduro, Trump, and the Politics of Power in the Americas appeared first on Global Research.

Protests are rapidly expanding across Iran, spreading from major commercial centers to universities and provincial cities, underscoring the depth of the country’s economic crisis and placing the government’s newly declared conciliatory approach toward dissent under its first major test. What … The post Iranians Protesting the Economy Have Trump’s Pledge to Intervene appeared first on Global Research.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Western outrage was absolute. Yet today, the tone is markedly more subdued regarding American aggression against Venezuela. The manner in which the media and politicians frame this invasion exposes a profound ideological double standard.… The post Not All Invasions Are Created Equal: The Revolting Hypocrisy Surrounding Venezuela appeared first on Global Research.

Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories. The post Stolen Soil and Corporate Welfare: The Global Scam of ‘Feeding the World’ appeared first on Global Research.

The Federal Reserve closed 2025 by cutting rates by a quarter point for the third time this year. The decision was not unanimous: nine of the board members voted in favor while three voted against the rate cut. The decision was made as the US economy continues to reel from tariffs, mass deportations, cuts to

In October 2023, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric made his first visit to China. During his three days in Beijing, he attended the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, met with Chinese president Xi Jinping, and signed bilateral trade deals. Two weeks later, Boric was at the White House. There, he participated in the

On January 6, I watched from my living room as a crowd of angry Americans stormed the Capitol. I did not know then that one of them was someone I knew. Footage released by the FBI confirmed that the young man who sat across from me in a class called Democracy and Education had ditched

This is the Feast of the Epiphany, and so the Yule Blog is drawing to a close for another year. The Christmas season ends on a high note, with the Feast of the Epiphany—also known as Three Kings’ Day, the day on which Christians traditionally commemorate the visit of the Three Wise Men to the infant Christ. As a kid, I always had some trouble understanding the business about the Three Wise Men and the gifts. There was that weird but compelling carol that they always sang in church on the Sunday closest to Epiphany. I must have been seven or eight years old by the time I figured out that “Orientare” is not the name of the country where the Three Kings came from. And then there were the odd gifts they were bringing. Gold always comes in handy, so I could see why you would bring gold to a baby—but what on earth were frankincense and myrrh, and why would anybody give them to a child? I figured myrrh might have something to do with myrtle, like the crepe myrtles that bloom so beautifully in South Carolina. So maybe the myrrh was flowers for the mom? The frankincense had me completely stumped, and it wasn’t until I visited Oman a few years ago that I really knew what it was or what it looked like: It’s the waxy resin of a tree that grows in the desert, and when burned it gives off a rich smell. It’s a principal ingredient of incense and has found favor among modern purchasers of “essential oils”. If you are ever lucky enough to visit the astonishingly beautiful and welcoming country of Oman, you will have innumerable opportunities to buy some for yourself at many different qualities and price levels. If your trip is like mine, you will also have the experience of seeing roadkill camel on the highway, and you will visit the tomb of the prophet Job, where you will learn that he was 14 feet tall and a Muslim. You will also learn that habitat degradation and over-harvesting are endangering the world’s frankincense supply.  In any case, the gold and frankincense may refer to a prophecy of Isaiah. In the sixth verse of the sixtieth chapter, the prophet speaks of foreigners coming to the Holy Land with gifts of frankincense and gold; these foreigners are said to be riding camels, which may be why the Wise Men in manger scenes so frequently have camels in tow. Frankincense was a key ingredient of the incense burned before divine altars in ancient times. It is still sometimes used in Catholic, Orthodox, and high Anglican services today, but there is less need for it in modern religious services than in the distant past. In the ancient world, altars were less a place of community meditation and gathering than a slaughterhouse; animals were killed on the altar and butchered on site. The process was not always clean. It got hot in the summer; without incense to cover the smell, few would have the hardihood to spend much time in the temple. As for the myrrh, it is also an aromatic substance formed from the resin of trees found in the southern, wetter portions of the Arabian Peninsula. Like frankincense, with which it was frequently blended in ancient times, myrrh was (and is) believed to have medical properties. The word myrrh means “bitter,” though, and the resin turns dark with age. It is hard to improve on the words of the “We Three Kings” carol: Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfumeBreathes a life of gathering gloom;Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,Sealed in the stone cold tomb. With Epiphany, the Christmas season, at least in the West, has finally come to an end; the Wise Men reach the manger, give their weird gifts to the baby, and they, the Holy Family, and we move on to the next phase of our lives. That also means the end of the Yule Blog, at least for now. It began with an introductory post on Christmas Eve with “The Thirteen Posts of Christmas,” and much of it was originally composed on a small island off the coast of Belize between bouts of scuba and snorkeling. I wish I were back there now as the freezing winter winds shake the windows of my Washington apartment. But the business of everyday life, writing commitments and travel will resume soon enough. Thanks to all those who have followed my venture in Yule blogging, and especially to those who’ve sent encouraging comments my way. Winston Churchill once dismissed a dessert complaining that “this pudding has no theme.” If this Christmas pudding of a blog has had a theme, it’s been the quest to interpret the meaning that seems to shape our lives and give them their depth and value. I’ve been trying to explore how the human quest for meaning shapes the way Christians approach the holiday of Christmas and to do that in a way that is helpful to anyone with an interest in the subject, whether Christian or not. The Feast of the Epiphany marks the end of Christmas and its natural climax. The name comes from a Greek word that was classically translated as the manifestation or the “showing forth” of the Baby Jesus to the world, something that happened when the Three Wise Men saw the child whose birth they foretold from the stars. These days we use the English word “epiphany” in another sense; it now means an “aha” moment when you suddenly understand something. The old meaning referred to the transmission of information; the new meaning signifies its reception. Either way, it’s an apt name for today: It marks both the day on which Mary and God showed the baby to the world and the day when the world got its first dim understanding of what this child might mean. This feast, also traditionally called the “Feast of Lights,” is a good day to look at the last of the three biblical passages that deal with the Christmas story. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke provide the narrative details of the story, and those are the ones we have looked at so far. The final source, the first 18 verses of the first chapter in the Gospel of John, says nothing about the details of Christmas: no shepherds, no angels, no chests of gold, and no myrrh—but it is perhaps the most profound meditation on what it all means to be found anywhere in the Bible. It’s short enough, and important enough, that I’ve put the King James translation below. The vocabulary is so simple and the subject so profound that the archaic English of the 1611 King James translation is as clear as the more modern ones—and, at least to my archaic taste, more beautiful and suggestive. (For the non-Bible experts, the “John” to which this passage refers is not the John traditionally credited with writing this Gospel; it is John the Baptist, whose baptism of Jesus was the starting point for Jesus’ public career.) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.The same was in the beginning with God.All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.In him was life; and the life was the light of men.And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.He came unto his own, and his own received him not.But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. That opening phrase, “in the beginning,” is a conscious evocation of the start of the Hebrew scriptures; the Book of Genesis begins with a Hebrew word that when translated into English means the exact same thing. The Greek word that the King James translators (a collection of scholars convened by James I of England in the early 1600s to produce an official, standardized English translation that would replace what the king considered the too-Calvinist Geneva Bible widely used until then) translated as “Word” is “logos.” (Λογος for the Greek fans out there.) It’s an important word in classical Greek philosophy. We see it today in many forms in English; most notably, it is the root of our word “logic” and also of the “ology” in words like biology and psychology. “Word” is a weak translation for “logos,” I think, although it’s hard to find a better. Logos is the ordinary way in which Greek speakers refer to the normal “words” of conversation and writing, but it also has a connotation of meaning and order that is missing in English. We should probably stick with “word” as the standard translation, but it’s a useful mental exercise to substitute “meaning” for “word” and re-read the start of the passage to catch this aspect of the Greek. So here are the first four verses again: In the beginning was the Meaning, and the Meaning was with God, and the Meaning was God.The same was in the beginning with God.All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.In him was life; and the life was the light of men. This is what I have been trying to get at all along in this blog: Christmas is important to Christians because from their point of view, the Baby Jesus is the meaning of Christmas, and the meaning of Christmas is the meaning of life. That meaning is the source of our life, the goal of our lives, and the light of all life and of all human beings. It has existed forever and somehow both lives with and is God on high, but It came into our world and into a Jewish family on a special day when Augustus Caesar ruled in Rome and Herod was king in Jerusalem. We had somehow lost touch with the Meaning of it all, but the Meaning hadn’t lost touch with us. It was intent on finding us anyway—and It did. That is what Christians have been celebrating since December 25 and what in many ways we go on celebrating all year. Many Eastern Christians will begin their Julian-calendar Christmas tomorrow; for them today is Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas to you all! For the rest of us, it’s back to the everyday world, which here in the infamously undrained Washington swamp can look a bit dreary on this January day. The nights are still long, the trees are still bare, and the days are still cold. I’m reminded of W.H. Auden’s wonderful poem, Christmas Oratorio. Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,And the children got ready for school. There are enoughLeft-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week –Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully –To love all of our relatives, and in generalGrossly overestimated our powers. But the cycle of the seasons has turned and the peoples who dwelt in the darkness have seen a great light. And with that modestly hopeful thought, here endeth the 2025–26 Yule Blog with a final quotation from the last stanza of John Milton’s Nativity Ode, the greatest Christmas poem ever written in English: But see the Virgin blest,Hath laid her Babe to rest.Time is our tedious Song should here have ending,Heav’ns youngest-teemed StarHath fixt her polisht Car,Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending.And all about the Courtly Stable,Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.

A police-involved shooting at a River Road home left a man dead and led officers to discover three additional bodies inside the residence on Monday evening, authorities said, prompting parallel investigations by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office and the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office. Officials said officers were dispatched around 5:30 p.m. to a report of a person armed with a knife at a home along the River Road corridor. Preliminary accounts indicate police encountered ... Read more

A 15-year-old boy has been charged as an adult with murder after police say he shot Uber driver Cesar Tejada during a predawn carjacking on New Year’s Day in a Lawrenceville subdivision, left him in the roadway and drove off in the stolen SUV before officers tracked and arrested him hours later. The case has rattled a quiet residential pocket northeast of Atlanta and sparked wide attention across metro-area ride-hailing communities. Police identified the victim ... Read more

January 3 is a day our adversaries should fear. On January 3, 1990, Manuel Noriega, the de facto ruler of Panama from 1983 to 1989, surrendered to face U.S. drug trafficking charges. On January 3, 2020, IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani was killed in an American drone strike. And on January 3, 2026, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is finally preparing to face justice in the United States after years of crimes against humanity, stolen elections, extrajudicial killings, and drug trafficking.  While it is likely more coincidental than contrived, January 3 is quickly coming to signify American leadership, peace through strength, and justice. The operation itself seems to have been conducted flawlessly—a massive credit to the military planners, intelligence officers, diplomats, law enforcement officers, and most especially, service members who pulled it off. Forcing Maduro to face justice in an American court is an important victory not just for our Venezuela policy but our foreign policy more broadly. As after Operation Midnight Hammer, our allies and adversaries now understand the capability, superiority, and precision of the U.S. military. No longer is the fall of Kabul the symbol of American power. Instead, it is that of the B-2 bomber and a blindfolded Maduro, weak and handcuffed on an amphibious assault ship. The world has been reminded that when we say something, we mean it—a message likely welcomed by Kyiv as it considers the offer of long-term U.S. security guarantees. The partners to our adversaries like Russia and China are also getting the message. The once-feared air defenses Russia provided to Venezuela proved useless against American technology. Even the presence of a Chinese diplomatic envoy was no deterrent. Faced with American might, Russia and China opted for condemnatory statements instead of tangible support for their supposed partner, recalling the aftermath of Midnight Hammer when the “Axis of Resistance” evaporated just as quickly as Iran’s nuclear facilities. But as with all significant operations—particularly those involving someone who has illegally held power for so long—what comes next is critical.  Those predicting chaos like what we saw in Libya and Iraq are missing a major distinction: We are not introducing democracy to Venezuela, only helping return it. Unlike post-Saddam Iraq, Venezuela already has a democratically-elected leader in Edmundo González, who won nearly 70% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election despite significant regime interference. And that support has only grown under his and Nobel-Prize winning María Corina Machado’s leadership. It was María Corina Machado who single-handedly united the Venezuelan opposition into one movement, but she didn’t just influence the opposition. Unlike opposition movements in other countries that often lack influence, the Venezuelan opposition has been infiltrating the regime for years. Just as America could not have taken out Iran’s nuclear facilities without the Israelis disabling its air defenses, so too America could not have gotten Maduro without the opposition’s efforts to build popular support and turn regime insiders into partners. Despite all this success, President Trump now runs the risk of losing the two great advantages we have in stabilizing a pro-U.S. regime in Caracas: namely, Venezuela’s democracy and Maria Corina herself. After rightly touting the operation’s success, President raised more questions than answers in his remarks to the press later that morning. His allusion to the possibility that Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s handpicked vice president, could serve as president and that the United States might assume a governing role inside the country stand to increase the risk of chaos which we’ve so far managed to avoid. There can be no option where Delcy Rodriguez leads Venezuela in the long-term. She lacks both the qualifications and legitimacy to run a country, has long-standing ties with America’s adversaries, and has been implicated in crimes against humanity. Leaving her in power would allow the Maduro regime to continue its malign activities, only without the man at the top, incentivizing others to do the same. What if, seeing an opportunity, Diosdado Cabello—whom Chilean prosecutors allege has command and control over Tren de Aragua—decides he would like to lead Venezuela and offers Trump a better deal than Rodriguez? What if disgraced former oil minister Tarek el Aissami, who allegedly created passports for Hezbollah to use Venezuela as a base of operations, offers an even better one? Allowing Rodriguez to run Venezuela will encourage the very infighting and power struggles that will bedevil our efforts and destabilize the country.  Instead, we should capitalize on the regime’s current weakness by announcing that its remaining officials can negotiate a peaceful exit or go the way of Maduro. This would be a smart use of American strength and the best way to ensure our victory does not turn into a quagmire. The same fears for stability are also there if the United States were to “run the country,” as President Trump suggests.  Fortunately, Secretary Rubio clarified these remarks in a statement on January 4, explaining that certain American individuals would “run Venezuela policy,” not “run Venezuela.” This is a key distinction. The United States should provide support to Venezuela with an eye toward advancing its own interests, but refrain from heavy-handed involvement that would sow confusion and require the ongoing presence of U.S. forces. In any event, there is no need. The Venezuelan opposition has been preparing for this moment for years. María Corina and her movement have the contacts, know-how, and legitimacy to get the job done. The United States saw a major victory this weekend that brings us closer to what seemed impossible just days earlier: a democratic future for Venezuela, and justice for her past. These achievements were historic, brave, and just. But if our goals are to stop weaponized immigration, fight drug trafficking, push our adversaries out of the hemisphere, and secure a prosperous future, the best choice is to support María Corina Machado and the opposition as it stabilizes the country. Otherwise, January 3 may prove to be not a symbol of triumph, but of tragedy.

Zohran Mamdani became the 112th mayor of New York City on New Year’s Day. He followed custom by being legally sworn in at midnight and holding a big public ceremony in the afternoon. Anyone who expected the mayor to back off his previous commitment to socialism was sorely disappointed. Mamdani was sworn in by Senator

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On December 17, a court struck down the protest bans imposed after the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu back in March. Weeks earlier, prosecutors had finalized an indictment meant to keep İmamoğlu, the leading opposition figure, jailed indefinitely. Together they show a system under strain, making parallel use of repression and legal tactics to

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Just weeks before the American military operation in Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro, the US energy giant Halliburton filed an unusual lawsuit in international court claiming the Venezuelan government owed them damages for US sanctions against the country. A separate case against Venezuela is also being pursued by another fossil fuel giant whose board includes an oil magnate whose

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By now, the Three Kings are almost to Bethlehem, and the Christmas season is drawing to a close. But the Three Kings (actually, “wise men” according to Matthew’s Gospel) aren’t just bringing their famous three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They bring with them another set of questions that we have to wrestle with a bit if we are going to see Christmas clearly. The story is pretty and the ideas are rich. But what actually happened in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago?  How much of the Christmas story is “real,” and how much of both this story—and ultimately the entire record of the scriptures—is historically accurate? This is a much more complicated question than it may appear at first glance, and to address it I’m going to have to return to some ideas and themes we looked at more briefly earlier in the season. Many Christians argued long before the rise of modern historical and scientific criticism of the holy books that much of the Bible was written to be interpreted symbolically rather than read as a historical or scientific account. Others have made the point that books like the Book of Jonah (in which, among other things, we find the famous story of Jonah and the whale) were widely accepted as “true” in the sense that the Narnia stories or The Lord of the Rings are true. Those twentieth-century English literary classics tell real and valuable truths about our world, but there isn’t a lot of archaeological evidence to support the claim that elves once walked the earth. And there are other biblical books—like the Song of Solomon, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and the Psalms—that are obviously literary rather than historical. So the question of biblical accuracy is complicated, and both believers and non-believers in the Bible’s religious message have reached a variety of different conclusions about the historical reliability of scripture. But even for people—like me—whose personal experiences with God and Christ tell us that there must be something important behind all this noise and excitement, the question of how to make sense of the biblical record is convoluted and thorny. It’s not as simple for an infinitely transcendent God to reveal Himself to culture-bound, historically placed people as you might think. When God committed Himself to humanity, He made the decision to enter history. He took us where He found us and met us where we stood. Even today, there are ways that our knowledge of the universe and of human history places sharp limits on what we can understand about God. The difference between our times and the era of Jesus often complicates our ability to make sense of the stories we are reading, or to understand what they meant to the original audiences who heard them. After all, when the Wise Men get to Herod, they turn out to be astrologers. They have seen a star in the heavens that announced that a king of the Jews had been born, so they traveled to Jerusalem to find the child. In a sense, it was a journey of scientific discovery: if they found that such a child had been born, their interpretations would be confirmed. The science of astrology would take a step forward. Two thousand years later, we are still talking about the star of Bethlehem. The latest theory was that it was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Maybe, but the story of the Wise Men and their mysterious star continues to echo through a popular culture in which faith in astrology remains strong.  We know enough about the astrology of the period to have some idea what the Wise Men were up to. With roots that have been traced back to ancient Mesopotamia long before the Jews got to Judea, astrology in some ways was humanity’s first science, and it rested on a very complex set of observations and measurements. Charting the course of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets through the skies, ancient thinkers noticed that the movements of those bodies formed patterns. Furthermore, they saw that these patterns corresponded with regular events on earth. When the sun was in the region of the sky that matches the constellation Aries, the earth renewed itself after the winter cold, and the crops once again began to grow. As the sun and the other planets and stars moved round the skies in their stately progressions, other cycles took place on earth. Birds migrated for the winter and returned in the spring. Sheep and camels migrated across the pasture lands; fish had their seasons for breeding, at times disappearing and at other times returning in great numbers. In one of the great intuitive jumps—a great scientific discovery, actually, which is still the basis of much of our knowledge of the universe today—the ancient thinkers posited that those heavenly bodies acted at a distance. The sun not only warmed you when you looked at it; somehow the sun’s rays were responsible for the seasonal changes taking place all around. The moon’s power somehow caused tides, and the tides were greater or less depending on the positions of the sun and the moon in their complex dance. Over the centuries, the sky scanners found that these observations had predictive power; by the time of Jesus’ birth, they were regularly predicting eclipses of the sun and the moon. Julius Caesar relied on this science to produce a calendar so accurate that, with Gregory’s tweak, it remains the basis on which the world organizes its affairs to this day. Somewhat ironically, the ancient astrologers worked like many scientists today: that is, they built models and looked for correlations to establish cause and effect. If Jupiter turned retrograde (if the planet’s apparent motion in the sky changed direction) and a great king died, then astrologers would assume that Jupiter’s change of direction caused the king’s death. These models were always being tweaked, but with enough tweaking they still seemed to work. Even in classical times skeptics sniffed that “correlation isn’t causation” and denounced astrologers as quacks—their “models” never quite seemed to predict with precision. Still, with so many demonstrable connections between the heavens and the earth, studying the heavens impressed many people as the best way to forecast future events. It was an approach so intuitively obvious and so intellectually compelling that down through all the recorded years of history, right into the Reagan White House and beyond, powerful women and men have sought the advice of qualified astrologers for insight into unfolding events. There are a number of theories about what happened in the skies over Bethlehem, but it appears that a powerful astrological event occurred around the time scholars think Jesus was actually born; there are several independent accounts of astrologers predicting the birth of a major new ruler at about this time. Based on what we know about astrological thinking of the era, it’s possible to make some reasonable conjectures about what the wise men thought was happening. Matthew’s Gospel refers to a star “in the east.” His better-educated Greek readers might have recognized this as a reference to the technical term, en te anatole, for a planet that appears on the eastern horizon moments before dawn. Modern astronomers refer to this event as a heliacal rising. Greeks thought that Jupiter’s heliacal rising was particularly portentous. The date of 6 BC for the birth of Jesus is compelling partly because Jupiter was a heliacal riser in that year. The recent so-called “Great Conjunction” between Jupiter and Saturn points to another possibility. As the planets move through the skies, they sometimes come so close together that they appear to merge, or almost merge, into a single orb. Astrologers attribute special cosmic significance to these conjunctions; it may have been an event of this kind that set the Wise Men off on their journey.  While it is impossible at this distance to be certain about what happened next, it would appear that Jupiter stopped moving in the heavens as the Wise Men reached Bethlehem. “Stood over” is another technical term from Greek astronomy and refers to the moment when a planet appears to stop in the night sky and then reverse course. Taking this as a sign that they had reached their goal, the Wise Men looked around Bethlehem and found Jesus.  So what do we make of this? Is the Bible putting its seal of approval on the “science” of astrology, so that we must be either Christians and believers in astrology or scoffers at both the religion and the “science”? Do we, as some Christians do, think that rather than an astrological event, the Bible refers to a special cosmic miracle, a light set in the sky to mark this special occasion in the history of the world? Or does this all sound like a bunch of legends collected by ignorant and superstitious people a long time ago and far away? All this gets us into deep theological waters where wiser and better-educated writers than I have gotten into trouble. Yet, the issue is too important to ignore. It brings us to the questions that any serious person has to ask sooner or later when looking into these things: How true is all this? Are these historical narratives or beautiful myths? What are these ancient documents trying to tell us, and how far can we trust them? My intellectual starting point for questions of this kind is to come back to the ideas we looked at earlier in this series: the question of a universal God who reveals Himself in a particular culture. Jesus was a Jew, shaped by Jewish customs, Jewish history, Jewish theological ideas, and Jewish scholarship. And it was not only necessary that Jesus be born to a particular mother speaking a particular language and inheriting a particular culture; He also had to be born at a particular time. And just as He was a man of His people, a Jew, He was a man of His time; the people around Him had no special access to scientific or archaeological knowledge other than what was generally known. And in a world without the Internet or printing, the people around Jesus would have likely been less well-informed on many important subjects than the cultivated, educated, and widely traveled Roman elite. In Jesus’ time, modern ideas of science and scholarship did not exist. In an age without printing, libraries were rare. Greek and Roman historians, the best of their time, believed that it was appropriate for a historian to write speeches for historical characters based on the historians’ knowledge of character and their understanding of the events. The great speeches in Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War weren’t copied from the speakers’ drafts or notes or even necessarily from interviews with those who heard the speech. A well-trained historian at this time wasn’t somebody who searched the written archives and other records and then wrote articles and books that carefully separated what was and was not known. A well-trained historian was somebody who, after careful study of the available information, was able to make intelligent deductions about what was missing, critique the obviously legendary and biased sources, and, on the basis of experience, intuition, and skill, was qualified to fill in the large gaps that the incomplete records of the day inevitably left. When the author of Luke’s Gospel tells us at the beginning of his work that he made a systematic and orderly investigation of the events to give us the best information available, he could only mean that he was doing what a responsible and serious historian of his time understood as his duty, whether or not that would qualify him for tenure in a modern American history department. And in trying to make sense of the oral histories and evidence available to the historian of a persecuted movement widely scattered across the Levant, many of whose members would have been semiliterate at best, Luke had a more difficult job than his secular counterparts. But if Jesus was going to be born when and where He was, and was going to reach out to the poor and the marginalized, a writer like Luke was the only kind of historian around for the job. That makes it tough on contemporary readers who want to apply the standards we use in modern history and science to events that took place long ago and far away. When we read a historical document, we have a very clear standard of what we mean by whether the document is accurate. If the Wise Men had brought a video camera with them, what pictures of the Holy Family would they have uploaded to wisemen.com on the web? We want answers to questions like this—and we can’t get them. Until and unless we build time machines, we must deal with the information that we have, collected by people whose ideas of historical verification and science were very different from ours. I’m not sure that this matters as much as some people—biblical ultra-literalists on the one hand and scoffing atheists on the other—think it does. Human beings almost never have the kind of knowledge and certainty that we want, but we press on nevertheless, making choices and commitments. From where I sit, it seems pretty certain that Something Big happened at the first Christmas and that history somehow turned on its hinges. As I see it, the old AD/BC division points to something important and real. History turned a corner with the birth of Jesus Christ, and while the written reports of that event don’t tell me everything I want to know, they do tell me everything I need. But there’s something else about the way the Gospel stories relate to readers. As we saw previously, Jesus was born into one nation to be the Savior of all. In the same way, He was born at a particular time in world history in order to reach out to people all over the world in many different historical eras. The time of His birth is an interesting one from this perspective. The Greco-Roman world is enough like ours that it is understandable to “moderns” in ways that, say, Egypt of the pharaohs or ancient Babylon is not. The rules of logic and many of the basic philosophical ideas that we still use today had been developed. The historical tradition that shaped Luke’s work is recognizably the foundation of the discipline of history as it is still practiced. Modern historians have more resources and have developed their craft well beyond anything Luke knew, but he and they share a basic understanding of what it is they are trying to accomplish. Jesus was born into a culture and a historical epoch that are relatively open and accessible to us today. When we read the letters of Paul or study his exploits and speeches through the writing of Luke, we can understand the intellectual traditions and literary forms being employed. Jewish theology and exegesis on the one hand, Greek philosophy and literary forms on the other (the “epistles” of Paul are letters that follow well-recognized patterns in other letters written at the time): these are not exactly the same as the intellectual and literary instruments we use today, but they are close enough and comprehensible to us that the New Testament is not, for example, like the Epic of Gilgamesh or other ancient literature that is more remote and less comprehensible on its own—or indeed sometimes on any—terms. At the same time, the circumstances and culture into which Jesus was born are also accessible to people in many pre-modern and non-Western cultures. Pastoralists and agriculturalists around the world who would be almost as bewildered by contemporary London or Shanghai as anybody in Jesus’ time are able to understand the world of the Gospels. Jesus spoke in simple ways about realities that unschooled people earning their livelihoods in traditional ways can easily and intuitively grasp. Bread, wine, sheep, goats, planting seeds, catching fish: not everybody around the world is directly familiar with all of these reference points, but the message of the Gospels is, demonstrably, clear enough so that people in every world culture at all kinds of levels of development can find meaning and coherence in it. If the Gospels came out of a culture that was closer to Western modernity, and they had therefore been written in ways that satisfied contemporary academic historiographic models (complete with photos and footnotes), the resulting 900-page biographies of Christ might be more satisfying to us, but perhaps much less accessible to poor farmers in Africa or simple fisherfolk in Indonesia. Shockingly, that matters a great deal to God. The story of the Gospels is a story for everybody, not just for sophisticated, college-educated citizens of advanced industrial democracies. Just as we have enough common ground, intellectually and culturally, with these documents to grasp what they are getting at even while we are frustrated by their indifference to some of our cultural expectations, so other people in other places and times have found them clear enough to hear and believe. The Gospels occupy a kind of center point in human culture as a whole: products of a particular time and place, but comprehensible to all. Medieval maps often placed Jerusalem at the center of the world. That was less a literal description of the way the makers thought about the physical universe (many medieval scholars knew that the ancient Greeks had not only figured out the shape of the earth, but that they had calculated its size), than a statement about the central importance of the Gospel stories in human life. If we could somehow make a cultural map of the world, the Gospels might well go somewhere near the center as well. The Wise Men who followed the star were led to the center of all things. They did not understand the difference between astronomy and astrology as well as we do, but they used what they knew to get to where they needed to be. It was enough for them, and people today can still do the same thing. We can follow the light we have to the center of all things, to a place where both shepherds and scholars can gather, and when we arrive, like the illiterate rustics and the cosmopolitan sages, we will find the source of a greater light that will illuminate many things we moderns, wise as we are, don’t understand.

As the Christmas season draws to a close, and the Yule Blog moves toward its close for another year, I find myself looking back over this short period of intense religion writing and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write about religion. Many people, both religious and non-religious, are affected by the religious beliefs and cultures around them; few of us know enough about how religion works and how different religious faiths and traditions shape the worldviews of the people and nations with whom we interact. Moreover, religious questions touch us at our core. If we exclude the deepest issues of all from our public discourse, we end up with a desiccated and artificial public conversation. Worse, leaving religion out of the discussion sends a signal, not very subtly, to young people and others that religion isn’t really that important anyway. But it’s also true that writing about religion has its perils. One is that religious writing stirs up powerful and sometimes angry feelings. There’s a reason why our grandmothers told us never to discuss politics and religion at the dinner table. I’ve tried to make the Yule Blog as irenic as possible, and while not every reader thinks I’ve succeeded, one of the really rewarding experiences I’ve had with readers over the years is hearing from the so many Muslims, Jews, and non-believers who’ve found these posts helpful. But there’s an even more dangerous pitfall of religious writing: hypocrisy. There is nothing our society likes better than to mock the pretentiously self-righteous when the lies come unglued and the feet of clay are laid bare. The famous televangelist caught in a No-Tell Motel with a lady not his wife, the family values spokesman caught in a pay-to-play tryst with a person of an inappropriate gender, the ostentatious teetotaler arrested on a DUI, the priest or the pastor who abuses a religious position to seduce vulnerable people who’ve come to the church for protection: our whole society dissolves into righteous indignation, gales of laughter, and malicious glee as yet another plaster saint gets revealed as just another sinner. The “Me Too” scandals of the last few years have shown us that hypocrisy is a bipartisan disease. Movie producers and other powerful figures who long positioned themselves as promoters of progressive politics were revealed to use their show business power to obtain sexual favors from those lower down the Hollywood food chain. A convicted sex offender with a long history of sex with underaged girls enjoyed the friendship and support of powerful friends on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2018 a cruel light fell on yet another group of hypocrites: “progressive” professors in the academy who have used their positions to pressure their students and graduate assistants into performing sex acts. In one particularly notorious case, leading feminists wrote in defense of the alleged abuser, a highly regarded feminist theorist. Hypocrisy is bipartisan, and is found among the virtue-signaling avatars of “progressive values” as much as among the ranks of those who ostentatiously endorse “traditional values.” Your jittery blogger, no freer from the seven deadly sins than many other aging American Baby Boomers, can’t help but feel a bit nervous stepping into this dangerous space. What gives me the right to speak to others about what is true, or beautiful, or good? Is my own conduct so exemplary, my spiritual development so advanced that I should be telling everyone else how it’s done? There’s an instinct to sit down and shut up about anything related to morals to avoid all risk of hypocrisy. And that instinct has some backing. Take for example the words of Jesus as reported in the King James Version of the Gospel of Luke (6:42): “How canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” Clean up your own yard first, then join the neighborhood improvement committee. Fair enough, and a casual glance around my moral front yard reveals a couple of dumpsters worth of rubbish that needs to be cleared away. That’s just what I see; I am sure that my friends, colleagues, and family know about many other shortcomings that my own narcissism and blindness prevent me from seeing. It’s easier to acknowledge this than to change it; one makes progress over time, but it’s painfully slow. At best, I’m in the state Gertrude Behanna describes in The Late Liz: “Oh Lord, I ain’t what I wanta be. Oh Lord, I ain’t what I oughta be—and Oh Lord, I ain’t what I’m gonna be. But Thanks Lord, I ain’t what I USED TO BE!—Amen.” But if only perfect people with unblemished pasts were allowed to write about faith and morals, nobody will ever say anything on the subject. Parents wouldn’t try to teach their kids right from wrong; teachers wouldn’t try to help students build moral character. No minister, rabbi, imam, or priest would stand before a congregation to preach a sermon. No Buddhist monk would give advice to the faithful; no Sufi master would counsel disciples on how to approach God. For some, like the group of atheists who rent billboards around Christmas to denounce religion as a scam, if a sudden silence were to fall over all the pulpits in the world, it would be very good news. But before too much time passed, even the most intemperate atheists would, I think, begin to notice that something was wrong. Morality isn’t a private affair. Your personal morality is your own choice and your own responsibility, but the consequences of those choices matter much more to other people—and their choices matter much more to you—than we sometimes remember. Society really does depend on the imperfect virtue of its members. Self-restraint and moral behavior, even only realized in part, really are the foundations of liberty. If too many people do the wrong things too many times, nothing can protect us from the consequences. The weaker the hold of virtue on a people, the stronger the state needs to be. If people don’t voluntarily comply with, for example, the tax codes, the enforcement mechanisms of the government need to be that much stronger. If more people lose their moral inhibitions against theft, and against using violence against the weak, then society has to provide a stronger, tougher police force—and give them more authority under less restraint. Yet at the same time the state becomes stronger, it loses control of itself. When the moral tone of a people declines, bureaucrats and the police are not exempt from the decay of morals. Perhaps a stratum of high-minded elites and civil servants can keep up a moral tone that is significantly higher than the declining standard around them, but lesser officials and the police will reflect societal norms. They will steal; they will abuse their authority; they will manipulate the processes of the state to serve themselves and their favored clients. The courts become corrupt; the security services link up with the crime syndicates. Night falls. This is not some abstract fear; history and the world today are full of places where the collapse of moral values blights daily life and undermines the prospects for development. I’ve been to many countries where nobody trusts the courts, the police, the politicians, or the journalists. None of these countries is a nice place to be, and more than anyone else it is the poor—those who most need the state and most need justice—who suffer the accumulated consequences of the moral failures of their society. The United States of America is beginning to look more like this as the influence of Christian faith declines. I don’t think it’s a change for the better. Sadly, people do not spontaneously choose to behave like angels. Virtue has to be cultivated and developed. Young people have to be persuaded, cajoled, admonished, and, above all, inspired to seek wisdom, self-control, a life of service, and all the other virtues that are necessary for our civil lives as well as for the fullest development of our true selves. Older people have to be reminded of their ideals, encouraged to live up to them, and to continue fighting the good fight through the long years of adulthood and on into the twilight. For some people, reason, common sense, and a strong innate moral constitution make it possible to live at least an apparently decent and useful life without the comforts and restraints of religion. But for many more, only the feelings of awe, gratitude, and fear occasioned by the awareness of a Creator can give them the strength and will to set out on the earnest and difficult road of struggle on the path to a moral life. Moreover, that inner sense needs to be refreshed: people need to hear the message expressed in compelling terms, and they need to hear it again and again through a lifetime. All this can only happen if a lot of people who are still fighting their own private moral battles stand up on their hind legs in public and praise those virtues that they have not fully attained. The recovering alcoholic has to tell the newcomer that there is hope for a better future—even if nobody knows better than a recovering alcoholic how easy it is to take that beckoning drink. The pastor has to encourage couples in the congregation to strive to fulfill the ideal of a faithful marriage, even if his or her own marriage hasn’t been spotless. The intellectual, struggling with questions and doubts about the meaning of faith, must share the best case for faith with a wider audience along with those honest struggles—or no one will benefit from a lifetime of study and reflection. Does this mean that I’m arguing for a world of morality based on systematic hypocrisy? G.K. Chesterton’s father, I once read, never went to church himself but always carried a Prayer Book on Sundays to set a good example for the lower orders. Would we be any better off if we added hypocrisy to the lengthening list of our social sins? It’s not that bad. There is a line, I think, that separates the posturing hypocrite from the honest (but flawed) advocate for morals and faith. There is a difference between the honest advocacy of hope and the self-glorification of a moral poseur—even if nobody in this business has completely clean hands. In any case, developing a sensible, honest, and penetrating discourse about corrosive human failings and their social consequence is a job that simply has to be done, particularly in a society like ours where the cultures of desire and indulgence run so rampant. I’m not thinking just or even primarily of sex, though essays on the effects of internet pornography on our society provides much food for thought. I’m thinking about a culture of restraint and virtue that prevents (at least some) bankers from ripping off their clients and the government, that keeps the military honest and loyal to their oaths, that ensures policemen think twice before pulling the trigger, that holds politicians back from the worst kinds of demagoguery and dirty tricks—and that punishes those who don’t. Let’s not over-dramatize or fall into moral panic. Our national culture is not going entirely downhill. The wide and deep hatred of slavery and repugnance against racism that exists in our culture, for example, is a real improvement over the past. There are some other ways in which we seem to be a less brutal, more caring society than we once were. But the signs overall are not good. The social tolerance for greed and self-indulgence that we’ve developed, the prevalence of materialism, the debasement of popular culture, the unscrupulous exploitation of human sexuality for commercial purposes: these are not making us happier, freer, or, as a society, more just. One doesn’t want to foam at the mouth and go all Elmer Gantry about it, but if nobody starts putting sandbanks on the levee, things could get ugly around here fast. The real point of writing about faith, though, isn’t to shore up the moral underpinnings of the civil order. It’s to integrate your deepest convictions into the work you do as a writer and thinker. Faith shapes the way I think about the world and the future of our species; I wouldn’t be doing my job as a political and social analyst if I didn’t make that clear. It’s both important to your clarity of thought as well as a part of the transparency you owe to your readers to share or at least to explain the ideals and the beliefs that matter most and allow you to make sense of the world, and to let readers get a better look at the heart of your vision. This annual 13-day stint as a faith blogger leaves me morally challenged by the complexities and the ambiguities this work involves. But it’s also left me feeling that this kind of work, somehow, has got to be done. Freedom of expression is one of the most valuable legacies that we as a people possess. That freedom isn’t much good if you don’t use it to communicate the things that move you most profoundly. And if we leave religion out of our national conversation, we end up with a vapid conversation that doesn’t address the deepest realities that move most of the people in this country. If religion disappears from our educational institutions and from the arts, our cultural life will become increasingly superficial and fragile. This might not matter so much if we lived in a time of profound peace and calm, but we don’t. The problems we face today can’t be addressed constructively without getting into the deep stuff and asking the hardest questions about the things that matter most.

We’ve been here before when it comes to the Trump administration’s attempts to force a political transition in Venezuela. In 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration attempted to engineer such a change through pressure, spectacle, and public declarations of inevitability. Military defections were said to be imminent. Regime insiders were allegedly ready to flip. Juan

The January 3, 2026 nighttime raid on Caracas that culminated in the capture of Nicolás Maduro was shocking only to those who misunderstood Donald Trump’s foreign policy from the start. For a decade, Trump has been miscast as an isolationist or a retrenchment-minded president eager to withdraw from the world. The reality is more complicated: Trump was never opposed to the use of American power abroad per se, but to open-ended engagements justified by high-minded moralizing. This distinction explains how Trump could denounce the Iraq War as a “big, fat mistake” during the 2016 Republican primary yet later authorize military action against Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, order strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, intensify operations against ISIS and the Houthis, and now oversee the removal of a hostile regime in Venezuela. What unites these actions is not isolationism, but strategic selectivity: limited objectives, overwhelming force, and refusing to subordinate American interests to abstract doctrines. For many Americans exhausted by the post-9/11 wars, Trump’s early rhetoric sounded like a repudiation of interventionism altogether. Some on both the antiwar left and the isolationist right projected onto him their own desire for disengagement, yet these disparate factions have been proven wrong. Trump was not rejecting American power. He was rejecting the idea that power should be deployed to achieve massive goals without a clear definition of victory. The contrast with the Obama administration is instructive. Barack Obama spoke eloquently about democracy, human rights, and the moral arc of history, but his foreign policy was defined by hesitation and half-measures. In Libya and Syria, the administration acknowledged the brutality of the Gaddafi and Assad regimes while refusing to commit the resources necessary to shape outcomes decisively. The result was not restraint, but prolonged chaos: a fractured Libya that remains unstable and a Syrian conflict that dragged on for more than a decade. Obama’s moral signaling outpaced his strategic follow-through in other arenas, too. Offering rhetorical support to protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, he remained naïve to the disproportionate power the Muslim Brotherhood would exert in subsequent elections. His famous maxim “don’t do stupid s***” captured a real insight into the dangers of impulsive intervention, but his lofty aspirations ignored how weak America would look when it failed to follow up. During this period, Russia annexed Crimea, China militarized the South China Sea, and Iran pocketed the benefits of the JCPOA while continuing its regional aggression. In Walter Russell Mead’s taxonomy of approaches to foreign policy, Obama fused Wilsonian rhetoric with Jeffersonian restraint: a belief in liberal ideals without a corresponding willingness to enforce them. That tension proved unsustainable in a world of opportunistic adversaries. Trump’s foreign policy, by contrast, dispensed with lofty ideas and focused instead on removing specific threats to the homeland. The killing of Qasem Soleimani was emblematic: a single, high-value strike that reestablished deterrence without dragging the United States into a new war. The same logic applied to subsequent actions against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and to the intensification of campaigns Trump inherited against ISIS and the Houthis. The capture of Maduro fits squarely within this pattern. Venezuela under Maduro had become a source of regional instability, a base for transnational criminal networks, and a driver of mass migration affecting the United States directly. Acting against that regime was not an exercise in democracy promotion, but a matter of hemispheric security. By waiting for the right moment and acting decisively, the administration achieved what years of sanctions, statements, and multilateral hand-wringing had failed to accomplish. In Mead’s taxonomy, Trump is best understood as a Jacksonian: skeptical of foreign entanglements and dismissive of elite moralizing yet fully prepared to use force when American honor, security, or prosperity is at stake. This tradition does have its limitations, tending to  undervalue the long-term economic and security benefits of alliances rooted in shared civilizational commitments, a Hamiltonian insight; neglect of the soft power benefits accrued through international development efforts; and the upholding of liberal norms governmental and nongovernmental institutions. Those who doubt the value of international economic development and soft power need only observe how China has pursued these goals. Yet the Jacksonian emphasis on decisiveness and clarity has virtues that were sorely lacking in the years after Iraq. By ‘aiming lower’ in terms of rhetorical ambition and backing words with action, Trump produces outcomes that are often more stabilizing than those of his idealistic predecessors. His narrower focus on interests can, counterintuitively, do more for global order than highfalutin moralism unmoored from power.  Trump never planned to withdraw from the world. His goal was to remind allies and adversaries that American power remains formidable when used sparingly and intelligently. From Tehran to Caracas, his message has been the same: the United States retains the capacity and will to act decisively, but only when its interests demand it.

America will soon learn the details of Donald Trump’s bold act of regime change in Venezuela, where special operations forces whisked Nicolás Maduro out of the country early this morning to face criminal charges in a New York court. That a president who promised to end foreign wars would launch a 1980s-style coup in Latin America will be jarring for many Americans on both sides of the aisle. But millions of Venezuelans and other freedom-loving Latinos are cheering the fall of a tyrant who, in their view, surely had it coming.  There were plenty of reasons to take down Maduro, his alleged connection to “narco-terrorism” being perhaps the least compelling. More serious was the threat posed by his ongoing collusion with America’s rivals, who saw in Venezuela a useful beachhead for harassing the US in its own hemisphere. It appears that Mr. Trump, eyeing a long-term struggle with China, wanted to lock down America’s backyard and signal to revisionist powers that this side of the world is definitively off limits. In many ways, it was a smart move. A clean victory in Caracas—at this point, still far from certain—would throw our enemies off balance and bring Trump new popularity in the run-up to midterm elections. But the unprompted toppling of a foreign government without congressional oversight raises deep concerns about executive power that need to be addressed. None of this is new, of course. A long line of American presidents have bypassed the constitutional requirement for a congressional declaration of war, citing their legal right to defend the national interest with military force short-of-war. But the Trump administration’s recent actions demonstrated new levels of disregard for the legislative branch. Congress was not meaningfully informed of US military activity around Venezuela, much less asked for an authorization of military force as it was after September 11. That is not to say that President Trump’s actions in Venezuela are illegal. It appears he signed a presidential finding authorizing the CIA to conduct lethal activities there under Title 50, which permits the Agency to enlist US military units in support of covert objectives. But the growing concentration of power in the Oval Office cannot be dismissed by reference to technicalities. The failure to provide a clear explanation to the American people or allow meaningful accountability by its representatives marks a dangerous new milestone for our democratic republic.  In its defense, the Trump administration could marshal any number of valid arguments. The constitutional requirement for formal declarations of war is widely seen as outdated and is all but ignored in practice. The need for secrecy, speed, and decisive action makes legislative consultation unrealistic in 21st century warfare. In the case of Maduro, the administration argues it targeted a criminal-terrorist enterprise and not a sovereign state. In any event, the president, as commander-in-chief, has a duty to defend the homeland.  The most troubling fact is that these arguments carry real weight—especially the claim about the changing nature of war. Setting Venezuela aside, there is little doubt that we are entering a dangerous new era in which conflict moves faster and takes different forms than it did in the past. In some respects, the Venezuela operation was still rather conventional with its missile strikes and elite units descending in helicopters to strike a compound. What of the innumerable forms of gray-zone conflict that lie ahead? Should US presidents be expected to consult Congress every time? Today’s debate centers on the wisdom and legality of Trump’s actions in Venezuela. But the deeper issue is whether any single president should be able to deploy history’s most powerful war machine without some measure of congressional oversight. Are Trump’s supporters confident that such power would be used wisely under a Zohran Mamdani administration? One need not be a Christian realist to recognize that power of that magnitude carries temptations which Adam’s children, both Democrats and Republicans, find hard to resist.  Our constitutional process for warmaking may indeed be too antiquated to meet the demands of our rapidly-changing century. But ignoring that process indefinitely, or extending unfettered power to the executive branch on a “don’t worry, trust us” basis, is a short-sighted response to the problem. Today’s events in Venezuela should be a wake-up call for lawmakers of both parties and the beginning of a serious congressional effort to either revise the existing framework for military action or devise a new one suited to the challenges ahead. Bold executive action is good for America, but only when paired with democratic oversight.

Connections between the adult Jesus, His childhood, and the family in which He was raised aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the Gospels don’t seem to sympathize with our natural human curiosity; whatever the Gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching His career. John has a short prelude and then does the same thing. Matthew and Luke give us the infancy narratives with a couple of sketchy references to childhood (flight into Egypt for Matthew, visit to the Temple in Luke), and that is pretty much it. To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary. Even this late in the Christmas season, I haven’t yet written much about Mary at the Yule Blog, other than to write about her virginity. That is a characteristically Protestant and American choice. Throughout the Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic worlds, the Virgin Mary isn’t just a figure in a storybook. She’s the object of widespread popular devotion. Much of this makes Protestants queasy for both cultural and theological reasons. Culturally, the folk piety of the Middle Ages combined Christian concepts with pre-Christian rituals and ideas. Christmas trees and Easter eggs had their origins in pagan customs and ceremonies; in many cases the old gods and spirits lived on, thinly veiled, as saints. We can see something like this today in Brazil and the Caribbean where African religious figures and ideas have been conflated with Catholic saints in various ways. The Virgin Mary, a powerful female figure associated with fertility, was a comfortable fit for many of the pre-Christian cults. The traditional European missionary strategy for Christianity was to assimilate as many features of traditional piety and culture as possible to the new religion. In addition, much of Europe was converted to Christianity from the top down. Kings and the nobility adopted the new faith, and it only slowly “trickled down” to the illiterate commoners. By the time of the Reformation, a wide gap had opened up between the folk piety in the countryside and the way that educated people understood their faith. The Reformers stood for what they saw as an intellectually consistent Christian position, and they wanted to bring all of cultural life under biblical norms. They associated popular rites, shrines, and customs with the “high places” and “groves” that reforming kings like Josiah sought to abolish in ancient Judea. At the same time, they argued that the Catholic belief that saints (and especially the Virgin Mary) could and would intercede on behalf of sinners was doctrinally wrong and a source of corruption in the church. It demeaned God, they believed, to suggest that intercession from Mary would change His mind. Is God’s compassion so limited, His wrath so blind, that He won’t show mercy unless the Virgin intercedes? Surely not, said the Reformers, and they promoted an individualistic faith in which each person stood alone before Christ. There was only one intercessor, only one mediator sinners required, and it was the son, not the mother who was the route to the Father. There was little room in this for the traditional veneration of the Virgin, and to this day Mary plays a very small part in the piety and the culture of the Protestant world. Another aspect of the traditional Marian cult made Protestants nervous. The attention traditionally paid to Mary’s role not only detracted, Protestants thought, from the unique stature and work of Jesus; it also undercut the Protestant idea that salvation came through faith alone, with good actions having nothing to do with it. When Catholics celebrated Mary as the Second Eve whose obedience restored the relationship with God that the first Eve lost, Protestants heard this as a claim that human beings by their own will could overcome the effects of sin. This is all very well, and I’m writing this blog to celebrate Christmas rather than to meddle in centuries-old theological quarrels, but I think the Protestant reaction against the excesses of medieval Mariolatry has gone too far. It’s possible that some of the Reformers threw out the mother along with the bathwater, and the Christmas season seems like a good time to reflect on the theology, rather than the cult, of Mary. The key to the classic understanding of who Mary is lies in ideas that the overwhelming majority of American Protestant churches share with the Catholics and the Orthodox. Specifically, these have to do with who Jesus was. Jesus is nothing if not paradoxical. On the one hand, Christians believe, He is the Second Person of the Trinity. But, say Christians, Jesus is also a human being. How does this work? Like the Trinity itself, the nature of the relationship between the divine and human in Christ is a complicated idea, and over the centuries has been described in very technical ways by theologians much better educated than me. With some notable exceptions, most Christians have held that Jesus has two natures combined in one person. He is fully divine, fully human—and still somehow just one person, one self. This idea was not formalized until the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, but the implications for Mary were already clear enough that 20 years earlier she was proclaimed Theotokos at the Council of Ephesus. Theotokos can be translated into English several ways: the most common is “Mother of God,” and a very large majority of Christians around the world considers Mary to be, literally, the Mother of God. Since Jesus’ two natures are combined in one person, she must be considered not only the mother of His “human side”; she is the mother of the whole person. God’s love knows no bounds; His decision to enter history was so unlimited, so unconditional, and so total that God became the son of a human woman. This really matters. Humanity 1.0, the human nature that was ruined and broken by the original sin of Adam and Eve, echoing, rebounding and multiplying through the generations, was a bridge between the world of matter and the world of spirit and ideas. Made of dust, we brought the Image of God into the physical universe, and, like Adam and Eve naming the creatures and tending the Garden of Eden, we would use our intelligence and creativity to complement and extend God’s work in nature, bringing it to perfection.  We blew that one pretty royally, but God isn’t thwarted so easily. Humanity 2.0, the new humanity based on Christ’s incarnation and redemption, has a much higher destiny. We are not just to be the bridge between matter and spirit by which the physical universe is brought into the world of spirit. In Christ, we are becoming the bridge between creation and divinity. Born of the dust, conceived in sin, our destiny is to enter the life of God Himself.  When Mary became pregnant with Jesus, that union of the divine with the human was launched. Her womb contained the uncontainable, her blood flowed through God’s veins, and her breathing sustained the Word through whom all creation came into existence. Mary bearing the unborn Christ is the sign of the world to come and of the breathtaking destiny to which we are all called. I want to stress that this is not a point of theology that divides Protestants and Catholics. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Charles Wesley all subscribed to the concepts laid down at Ephesus and Chalcedon; contemporary Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and many others adhere to churches and traditions that consider these ideas to be basic parts of the Christian faith. (Mormons and Unitarians do not; most mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Pentecostals do.) The question I’d like to suggest for readers here toward the end of the Christmas season is this: What respect and honor is due to the Mother of God? To sharpen it a bit, remember that Christians believe that Jesus perfectly fulfilled the law of Moses, not just ritualistically or to external appearances but sincerely and from the heart. The ten commandments sum up that law; the fifth commandment tells us to “honor your mother and father.” Christians believe that Jesus honored His Father by a life of perfect obedience all the way to the cross. What honor do we think He paid to His mother? How exalted is she in heaven? What good thing would He withhold from her? What honor should we, His brothers and sisters by adoption, pay to the mother of our Savior and Lord, a woman who, if we take these things seriously, must be considered in some very important sense the mother of all believers? I am not suggesting that Southern Baptists start chartering planes for pilgrimages to Lourdes or holding Wednesday-night rosary sessions. And it’s clear to me (as indeed it is to most Catholics and Orthodox) that the most important way of honoring the Virgin Mary is to do your best to follow her son. Yet sometime during the Christmas season, it might be worthwhile for my fellow Protestants to ask themselves how they propose to honor the Mother of God this year. If Marian doctrine originates in our attempts to come to grips with the nature of Jesus, our understanding of Jesus will deepen if we study her. Christians of all stripes can usefully spend some time thinking about the woman who became the Mother of God, and looking at some of the ways she seems to have left her mark on Jesus. The passionate concern for the poor that shaped much of Jesus’ ministry can already be seen in her response to the angel Gabriel as reported by Luke. Giving thanks to God, she says of Him that: He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. This is not a bad description of what Jesus did as an adult. The empathy for social outsiders, the refusal to be fooled or intimidated by wealth and social position, the radical intolerance of the abuse of privilege—they all seem prefigured in the words of His mother. Another way in which Jesus was unusual for His time was His willingness to engage in serious intellectual and moral conversation with independent and unconventional women. The “woman of Samaria” who interrogated him about the water of life, Mary Magdalene, the two women from Bethany (Martha and Mary) who were clearly His close friends, the woman “taken in adultery” whose stoning He prevented: Jesus is comfortable and relaxed with many of the women He meets, jokes with them, and takes them utterly seriously as free human beings. There is not one single verse in the Gospels in which Jesus says or does anything to suggest that women are anything less than men. This is one of the most unusual things about Jesus. He doesn’t seem to have had a misogynist bone in His body. We don’t see that in the lives of other great men of antiquity: not even people like Socrates and Plato. Do we really have to ask ourselves who taught him to see women this way? Down through the ages, Christian civilization has often treated women badly, yet visitors from other great world civilizations have often remarked on the (relative) freedom and equality that women enjoyed in the Christian world. The cult of the Virgin played some part in this; the medieval concept of the courteous and chivalrous knight was often associated with Marian piety. I like to think that there is something more: from what the Bible tells us about Mary, we know that Jesus was the son of a strong and independent woman. Steeped in the ethical traditions of Judaism, she was passionate about justice and willing to stake everything on her sense of God’s call. She had a soft spot for social outcasts—after all, she was once in the position of being an unmarried, pregnant woman in a censorious and traditional society. She was thoughtful and meditative, but capable of swift and decisive action when the time came. She was unflinching and courageous. She followed God, not social convention. She was ready to be snickered at and pitied by the gossips of Nazareth and to risk her relationship with Joseph to respond to God’s call. She followed Jesus to the cross and watched her son die; her loving presence would have been one of the few comforts He had during that final ordeal. She was ready to respond to the unexpected, to have her life wrenched out of a comfortable and traditional groove when God showed her that He had something else in mind. This is the kind of woman to whom God came looking for a mother for Jesus. No other human being in the history of monotheism (other than Jesus) was called to this kind of intimacy with God. And if Christians take their own theology seriously, our Lord and Savior was shaped by her genes and her character. Mothering is serious business, something I think about often as Christmas follows Christmas without my own mother at the holiday feast. Jesus would not have been who He was if He had had another mother or no mother at all. She put a lot of herself in her son, leaving an imprint on His character that is visible from a distance of two thousand years. And she didn’t just mark him. She marked, marks us. Our civilization, for better or worse, has been shaped through its complicated, many-sided encounter with the man she raised and the faith that grew up around Him. We are all sons and daughters of Mary today, whether we acknowledge it or not. I grew up in the Episcopal Church where one of the favorite hymns was “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones,” often sung on All Saints’ Day (November 1). I was an adult before I realized that one of the stanzas invokes the Virgin Mary: O higher than the cherubim,More glorious than the seraphim,Lead their praises, Alleluia!Thou Bearer of the eternal Word,Most gracious, magnify the Lord,Alleluia! Alleluia “All generations,” she marveled to the angel while accepting God’s request to bear His son, “shall call me blessed.” For two thousand years they have; God blessed her and through her, He continues to bless us all. By saying “yes” to God’s plan, she became the mother of meaning; without her, Christmas just doesn’t add up.

Our hopes for 2026

Fourteen years ago at this time, New York City was paralyzed by a blizzard; thankfully, I was visiting family outside the city when the snow fell and was able to hole up in my house upstate where I taught at Bard College. There was plenty of snow up there, but around Bard, people know how to deal with big snowstorms. The streets were clear, the stores open, and it was a quiet New Year’s weekend grading term papers and otherwise tending to business. A fresh fall of snow is a wonderful thing. For the first few hours, the snow is pure and fresh; then the people (and the dogs) come out. Gradually, the snow is trodden down, plowed into icy heaps, and begins to turn various unsightly colors as the soot from passing cars and various other substances defile it. After a few days, it is an ugly, unsightly mess, and one longs to see it cleared away. New years can be like that, too. They start out clean and pure, and we make resolutions to keep them that way. Then, over time, the old habits creep back, and before long we will be needing a fresh start once again. That’s not a bad metaphor for human history. Think of South Sudan, newly independent after decades of war with northern Sudan. It was going to be a new beginning, a bright new world. But it wasn’t long before new wars broke out as bitterness, jealousy, and tribal rivalries poisoned the life of the new polity. Think of the Arab Spring. Or think of the Internet—so bright and shiny with the promise of a more peaceful and democratic world not long ago, and now increasingly a venue for espionage, hacking, the worst kinds of sexual exploitation, and cyberwar. Human nature doesn’t change when it goes online, and all the problems of the “real” world are popping up in cyberspace. God has a problem. It’s us. We keep messing things up. Over the past few days, we’ve been delving into the meaning of Christmas; it’s led us into a discussion of the Christian concept of God. There are many qualities that can be used to describe the Deity; Muslims often speak of the “99 names of God,” and it’s an instructive and beautiful list on which any monotheist can profitably meditate. But at the end of the day, for Christians, the heart of the matter is this: God is love. Love doesn’t just describe God’s relationship to the creation; it describes God’s essence—His inner life and being. This, as we have seen, is the origin of the Christian idea of the Trinity: love is so intrinsic to the divine nature that we cannot conceive of His unity as solitude. From a Christian perspective, God’s act of creation is an expression of love. God made the world because He wants an abundance of beings and sensibilities to love, to be with, to share life with, and to make happy. That is where we come in. We have no way of knowing whether there is life on other planets, much less what, if anything, it thinks and whether it has religious aspirations. But among those life forms we know anything about, people have a particular place in God’s plan. The Bible tells us that God loves animals and even plants. He knows when any sparrow falls, and it is His care that provides the beasts of the field with their nourishment. As the Psalmist says, “The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand and satisfiest the desire of all things living” (Psalm 145:15-16). God clothes the lilies of the field, Jesus says, more gloriously than King Solomon in all his robes (Matthew 6:28-29). But people have a special place in the Creator’s heart. Made in God’s image and given both personality and intelligence, we were created because God wanted beings with whom He could share the kind of love that animals and plants can’t give. Strange as it may seem, the Maker and Ruler of the universe seeks out the pleasure of our company and has made Himself vulnerable to us; we can please God and we can hurt Him by the ways we treat Him, treat ourselves, and treat one another. All this means that human beings present God with an extraordinary problem. On the one hand, God finds us irresistibly lovable, beautiful, and, where God’s love is concerned, needy. How could we not be? Beings made by love out of love are inescapably drawn to the perfect love from which they come. No matter how grizzled and grumpy we become with the passing years, or how pimpled and snarky we turn in our adolescence, God looks at us with the kind of tender solicitude and hopeful anxiety with which we look at small children. Yet at the same time, like many angelic-looking children, we can be a fairly nasty bunch of characters, more Lord of the Flies than Little Lord Fauntleroy. Just pick up a newspaper or go to your favorite news site: genocides, starvation, sexual tyranny and exploitation, vast contrasts of poverty and wealth; terror, arms races, environmental destruction; the rich and the poor cheating and stealing from one another, with the rich generally doing best because they’ve got more power to abuse; nations nursing ancient wounds as hatreds fester. Or back off from these entrenched historical evils and look at what goes on in families, neighborhoods, and among friends. Children of alcoholics and addicts grow up with psychological wounds that predispose them to repeat the same sad behavior. Widespread epidemics of cheating in school, cheating on taxes, cheating on expense accounts, cheating on spouses. It’s a bit like the national debt; each generation gets the bill for its parents’ shortcomings—and passes that bill with some additional charges down to their own heirs. Christians talk about this situation under the heading of “original sin,” saying that our species has been a dysfunctional family since the dawn of time, and that each of us repeats and adds to that cycle of abuse and betrayal in our own way, even as we suffer from the damage done by those who came before. Other religions object to the kind of metaphysical structure that Christians give to the concept, but virtually everyone intuitively gets this picture of a human race somehow at war with itself and fundamentally out of whack. This flawed race, trapped in a cycle of cascading pain and wrong, is what and who God is bound and determined to love; the question is, How can He do it? From the Christian point of view, this is not a trivial problem. People aren’t just messy and incomplete. We are actively evil. We aren’t just victims of an unjust society and a tragic history; we make choices that perpetuate and even deepen injustice and add new dimensions to unfolding tragedies of our time. God is so loving that He can’t leave us to perish in our misery and mess. He wants us with a love that will not be denied. Yet at the same time, God is too just, too all-seeing to overlook what’s going on. Think of a God’s-eye perspective on someone who beats and abuses a child. God sees the helpless victim and burns with anger; yet He also knows that the perpetrator was once an innocent victim. He felt all the fear and pain of the young child who has grown up to become an abuser, feels all the pain of the adult who has grown up twisted. Knowing the future, as God does, He perhaps can see a time ahead when today’s victim is tomorrow’s bully. He can see the fanatical Nazi as a child growing up in a culture wrenched out of shape by defeat, civil strife, and a ruinous inflation. He can see the Russian mafioso as the product of a society that suffered genocidal violence at the hands of both Soviet and Nazi oppressors. He sees the genocidaires of Rwanda and Darfur as victims in their own way of societies gone deeply wrong. Yet He also hears the cries of their victims. It is not just the spectacular sinners, with their hands drenched in blood, whose victims cry out for justice. The quiet, respectable sinners—those American whites, for example, who could have done something about racial injustice but chose to turn a blind eye—have responsibilities that a just and loving God cannot ignore. God cannot love the victim of violence or exploitation without loving and indeed demanding justice; but He cannot love anybody at all unless He finds a way to deal with the reality that no human being can withstand strict moral scrutiny. To hold everyone to a strict standard is to condemn the whole world, but to wink at the real evil that people do is to give up on the moral standard of true justice, and to leave people trapped in a cycle of evil and pain. Christians believe that God refused to choose between His love and His justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world and say things were OK when they weren’t, but He also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess. Instead, God chose to engage. He would draw closer to us, but not in a way that took evil lightly. Specifically, God chose to become a human being, to live with us, and ultimately to do for the human race what we could never have done for ourselves. The baby in the manger wasn’t just there to look cute and beam rays of benevolence to shepherds and kings. He was born to suffer rejection and injustice, to be tortured and scourged, humiliated and mocked, to face an unjust trial before an oppressive foreign ruler, to feel the full weight of the wrath of God due to all the evil in the world, and to die a cruel death while being ridiculed and mocked by those He came to serve. God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The Creator of the world took the hit we had coming. God really knows us; He knows the worst things about us and isn’t fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And He still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done. Jesus came to deal with the flaws, the weakness, and the twisted selfishness that stand between us and God. He came to deal with the reality that no matter how much we might wish to live the right way—we haven’t and don’t. He came to show and live out God’s radical commitment to His creation. People aren’t just a hobby for God; the universe isn’t a diversion for Him. Infinite Love made us to share an infinite intimacy and will go to infinite lengths to restore that bond no matter how deeply or how horribly we have failed. That love is not blind; it knows what messes we make of our lives and how we wound and damage others. But even so, God is determined to be with us. That is why there was a baby in the manger. That is why we celebrate this time of year. God knows exactly who we are, loves us anyway, and will do whatever it takes to make this relationship work.

Back in the beginning of the Christmas season, I wrote about the way the Gospel Christmas narratives “roll the credits” by giving genealogical tables that link Jesus to Jewish history. In contemplating Christmas, we should never forget that the first Christmas was first and foremost a Jewish event. Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the baby: they were all Jewish. And as the baby Jesus moved toward adolescence and adulthood, it was Jewish religion, Jewish literature, Jewish culture, and Jewish history that shaped His personality and His mind. As Adam Garfinkle reminds us, New Year’s Day has long been celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision, the day on which the baby Jesus underwent the traditional rite that, from the time of Abraham, was seen as proclaiming the special relationship between the Jewish people and God. These facts are so familiar to us that it’s sometimes easy to miss the troubling questions around them. A regrettable couplet by the British journalist William Norman Ewer sums up what some have felt as they contemplate these circumstances: How odd of GodTo choose the Jews Ewer seems to have been making the kind of slyly antisemitic joke that was all too popular at the time, but there is a real question here—not so much about why the Jews were chosen as about why there should be a chosen people at all. Why would a universal God who presumably loves all people equally choose one people with whom to have a special relationship? How can we reconcile the claims of this special relationship with God’s commitment to universal justice? For many centuries, the question of the chosen people was more theological than political. But with the rise of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century, that changed. As Jews from Eastern Europe and the Middle East immigrated to Palestine, a new Jewish state rose up on territory last controlled by Jews almost two thousand years ago. The rebirth of the state of Israel has turned theological questions into political ones. There are those, Jewish and Gentile, who believe that the Jews have a God-given right to all of the land of biblical Israel. There are others, Jewish and Gentile, who argue that the Palestinians have a natural claim to a land that, until the twentieth century, had not had a Jewish majority since ancient times. Does God love Jews more than Palestinians? Do the promises God made to the ancestors of today’s Jews as reported in the Hebrew Scripture have any relevance to the problems in the Middle East today? Should they? For anyone who is interested, I’ve written a book on the U.S.-Israel relationship that addresses these and many related questions. The Arc of a Covenant is available at Amazon and other booksellers. But this is not the place for a political analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute; for the record, I have always believed in a two-state solution so that each people can live in a state of their own with safe and recognized frontiers. I only wish such a seemingly commonsense but actually very complex and contentious result was easier to achieve. But these days, we often forget the context in which the state of Israel was founded. The “Jewish Question” was just one piece of the much bigger national question that inflamed European and Middle Eastern politics in the past two hundred years and led to countless riots, revolutions, massacres, ethnic cleansings, genocides, and wars. In 1800, Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East were essentially divided between three multi-ethnic, multi-confessional empires: the Holy Roman Empire, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. By the year 2000, none of these empires existed, and the territories they once controlled were divided into dozens of ethnic nation-states. Tens of millions of people were killed in the political struggles and global wars that this process unleashed. In Europe, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (with the characteristic mix of vicious warfare, ethnic cleansing, and episodes of genocide that marked the entire process) were, hopefully, the last outbreak of this madness. In the Middle East, the Palestinian-Israeli struggle is left over from this process; so are the struggles for independence among the Kurds, and from Afghanistan through Syria to the Maghreb, unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions continue to stoke conflicts. Conflicts in former Soviet territories like the Armenian-Azerbaijani struggle, the wars that have ripped through Georgia since 1989, the hideous wars between the Russian government and restive nationalities in the Caucasus and the even more murderous conflict now taking place in Ukraine, the murderous conflict in Syria: these appalling eruptions of communal hatred in our day are the latest episodes in the long and bloody story of religious and national identity wars that have done so much to shape recent centuries of world history. Looking around the world today, nationalism remains a powerful and even uncontrollable force with the ability to plunge the world into new horrors as devastating as anything in the twentieth century. In much of Africa and Asia, ethnic conflicts and quarrels over boundaries between angry nation-states are constantly simmering; any random incident can produce huge crises or bloody wars from Korea to the Congo. So, when we speak of God “choosing” the Jews, the most perplexing problem is less about the specific people God chose than a question about why God would contribute to the formation of these national and cultural identities that have been responsible for countless wars. The Jews are not the only people who think they’ve been chosen. American presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden have often spoken about a unique American role in God’s plans for the world. From Joan of Arc to Charles de Gaulle and beyond, French nationalists have believed in France’s unique global destiny. Russians and Poles have seen themselves each as the suffering Christ among nations, whose struggles help to redeem mankind. The Serbs cast their history in the heroic light of defending the gates of Christian Europe against the Muslim Turks. Many Turks believe that God has called their country to play a leading role in Islamic and ultimately in world history. Many Arabs see the role of the Arab people as unique in a similar way; in what language, after all, was the Koran revealed? People seem pulled in two directions. On the one hand, we form strong group identities, and these identities are the basis of our political loyalties; on the other, we recognize universal values and acknowledge a duty, at least in the abstract, toward people everywhere regardless of their race, language, color, or creed. It’s a puzzle. Human beings need roots in a particular culture and family, and those roots shape them; at the same time, human beings have values (like freedom and democracy) and ideas (like the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of thermodynamics) that demand to be recognized as universal. We seem perpetually torn between “cosmopolitan” and “local” values: universal ideas and the customs of the country. This tension plays out in politics all the time. At the extreme, the well-being of the group is elevated to the highest good of all: national and racial egotism gone psychotic was the root sin of Nazism. The moral and physical ruin that resulted still makes the question of nationalism a painful one in Germany today; Hitler’s insane and distorted nationalism discredited the normal and inescapable feeling of collective identity and loyalty that seems indispensable to the effective functioning of a civil community. In Europe and elsewhere, many intelligent people look back in horror not just on Nazism but on the whole bloody history of nationalism. They look at the pogroms, incidents of ethnic cleansing, intensely murderous rivalries between ethnic nation-states competing over the same pieces of ground; then they look at the increasing need for a globally integrated economy to have global standards and global institutions. They hope to build a transnational or post-national society that rests on universal principles and global institutions more than on the customs and claims of the world’s many peoples. They’ve got a point. It is self-evidently true that our global economy and the many interests the world’s countries have in common demand more complex forms of international cooperation than ever before. And the more I travel and read, the more I learn about the destructive passions that simmer just below the surface of even the most “civilized” national communities. But I don’t think the world is going to learn Esperanto anytime soon. The pull of national and religious identity is too strong—and the pull of cosmopolitan civilization and universal institutions is ultimately too weak to call forth the kind of economic and political solidarity that some kind of world government would need. Germans don’t want to pay the bill for early retiring Greeks in the EU; they have even less solidarity with Uganda and Laos. We are stuck with nationalism and other irrational but deeply held identities and values; we must learn to work through them rather than against them.  We think of the trade-off between local identities and universal values as a modern problem, but it is deeply rooted in human experience. In the ancient world, where tribal and family affiliations were very strong, many cultures shared a strong belief in the moral duty of hospitality to strangers, whatever their tribe. Day-to-day life revolved around your own group of close associates, but the duty of hospitality required a willingness to look beyond these limits to recognize the common humanity and worth of all people. This is where we still are as a species; our lives are bound up and committed to those around us who share our language, our culture, and perhaps our blood—but we know that this is not enough and that when the opportunity comes, it is our duty to rise above these limits and act on our duties to the whole human race. The question of our divided loyalties between the particular and the universal is deeply embedded in Christian history and the Christmas story. Christmas is, above all, the feast of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the idea that God became man (from the Latin word for “flesh,” as in “carnivore” and “carnal”); if the universal God was going to become a human being, He needed to become one person in particular. Human beings aren’t blank slates; as we grow to adulthood, we are shaped by the culture that surrounds us. For God to become fully human, He had to have this experience as well. God’s choice was to ground His Son in the life of the Jewish nation, a people whose history and literature reflected by that time centuries of struggle with the demands of monotheistic, Abrahamic religion. This was not, Christians believe, out of any idea that the Jews were better than other people or the only people in whom God took an interest. Indeed, the biblical record of the Jewish Scriptures is largely a record of God’s disappointment with the all-too-human failings of the people He chose. But neither the designation of Israel as the “chosen people” nor the birth of Christ into a Jewish family was intended to limit God’s concerns to one people. Although Christians and Jews disagree about many things, they agree that God’s special relationship with Israel was always intended to be bigger than Israel. The relationship was with Israel, but it wasn’t ultimately about or at least only about Israel—God was working to build a people through whom He could reach out to the rest of the world. From a Christian perspective, part of this larger role for the Jewish people is fulfilled through the life and work of Jesus. It was from Judaism and the Jews that Jesus learned who He was and what He had come to do. The long struggle of the Jewish people to understand who this God was who had called them, a struggle that continues long after Jesus and has its own dynamic quite independent of Christian thought, helped create a culture that shaped not only Jesus Himself, but the band of close associates who took His message to the world. And when Jesus then through His ministry of teaching and healing, and above all through His death and resurrection, set out to change the world, the work that He did for people everywhere was a fulfillment of the purposes, Christians believe, behind God’s establishment of a special relationship with the Jews. If God intended to rescue everyone, to bring the fullness of both His love and His justice to bear on the human condition, God would have to become someone; this someone would have to be somebody from somewhere. The person would have a family and friends, would speak some particular language, and would work with a particular set of ideas. Saving all meant choosing some. God’s choice of one people was a necessary part of His love for all. Without those deep roots in Jewish life that sustained Jesus and the first Christian believers, there could be no Christian faith; yet the first thing the young church had to do was to spread beyond its Jewish origins. As it grew, it encountered not only the Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean basin, but also the ancient cultures of Iran, the Arab world, Ethiopia, Armenia, and beyond. At a very early stage, the written records of the Mediterranean church migrated from Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus and the Jews of His time) to Greek, the most common language of the eastern Mediterranean world. The words of the Bible have been translated into literally thousands of languages, and people from all of the world’s major (and most of its minor) language and culture groups pray to the God of Israel, acknowledge a Jewish Savior, and turn their thoughts to Bethlehem at this holy time of year. But even as the church looks to Bethlehem, it looks beyond. The liturgical calendar (the church calendar used, with some variations and differences, by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists, among others) makes sure we don’t forget the universal mission of the church as we celebrate Christmas. December 26 in the Western churches commemorates the death of St. Stephen, a Greek-speaking Christian who was the first person to be killed because he believed in Jesus. In the English-speaking world, the “Feast of Stephen” is known mostly because of its connection with the “Good King Wenceslaus” carol; it was “on the Feast of Stephen” that Good King Wenceslaus looked out and saw that the snow lay “deep and crisp and even.” The multiculturalism goes on; St. Wenceslaus is the patron saint of the Czech Republic. For thousands of years, the Catholic and Orthodox churches have worked to find and celebrate “national” saints and festivals that will help the people of each country and region find something of their own in the Christian faith. The imagery of the Christian faith similarly changes around the world to reflect local traditions and tastes. In Cuzco, Peru, there is a painting showing Jesus and His disciples at the Last Supper; the main dish is the local favorite of roast guinea pig. Christianity has generally tried to “incarnate” itself in the world’s different cultures and traditions, using familiar language and ideas wherever possible. This can be controversial. In the famous “Chinese rites” case, St. Francis Xavier’s attempt to allow Chinese Christians to continue observing certain traditional Chinese rites commemorating their ancestors was condemned by Pope Clement IX in 1715. At other times, it’s non-Christians who object to Christian appropriation of words or concepts they consider their own. In Malaysia not so long ago, a Catholic newspaper fought a court case in an effort to use the word “Allah” to describe the Christian God in its pages against the objections of some Islamic clerics who feared this use of a familiar Islamic term could aid Christian efforts at proselytization. (In Malaysia, it is against the law to attempt to persuade Muslims to change their religion). The twentieth century saw an explosion of Christian missionary activity and Christian conversions outside the old Christian heartlands of Europe and the Americas, an explosion that continues today. The century also witnessed the extraordinary rise of locally based and locally led churches in “mission territory” around the world. In China, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeastern Asia, the twentieth century (and especially its last half) saw not only the greatest numbers of conversions to Christianity in world history; it also witnessed an unprecedented flowering of locally based leadership developing forms of worship and organization that adapted the old faith to new cultural milieus as never before. Where all this is leading one does not know; in Europe, Christianity sometimes appears to be on its last legs, even as it flourishes in parts of the world where it was almost unknown just a century ago. Just as Europe’s political domination of the world ended in the twentieth century, its cultural dominance in world Christianity has faded away. A little more than two thousand years after the first Christmas, Christianity is both more universal and “cosmopolitan” than ever, and yet it is also more deeply rooted in more cultures than ever before in its past. To Christians, the changes and renewals sweeping over the Christian world mean that the Christmas event isn’t over yet. The mysteries of Christmas and the Incarnation continue to unfold before our eyes. The world’s cultures are being transformed by their encounters with that mysterious Jewish rabbi and the universal message He carried. But while people all over the world turn to one Lord, they turn to Him in hundreds and thousands of tongues and traditions. The Christmas story doesn’t tell us how to reconcile the virtues and the vices of universal cosmopolitanism and local loyalty. But it suggests that we can somehow try to be true to both ideals: to be loyal members of our nations, our families, our tribes—and at the same time to reach out to the broader human community of which we are also a part. One baby in one manger, from one family and culture, but bearing a message that in the fullness of time would reach the whole world. That is, Christians think, how God arranged things. And if some Christians these days eat guinea pig, some falafel, others turkey, and others dim sum as they celebrate the birth of the Child, that is pretty much how it is supposed to be. A child born to one nation grew up to be a savior for all. In going from His very particular and individual roots to reach out to the whole world, Jesus gives us all a pattern of how being deeply embedded in one culture and one nation can lead to a universal vision and mission. That part of His work is perhaps more important today than ever before; as the New Year begins, we should reflect on the need for people who are grounded in their own culture but capable of reaching out beyond it.

Executive Summary: The last few months of 2025 have seen a proliferation of authoritative policy documents and commentaries discussing “new quality combat forces” (新质战斗力), a term that refers to the integration of emerging technologies with military capabilities. These include the Central Committee’s “Recommendations” (建议) for the 15th Five-Year Plan, a commentary on the plan by The post New Quality Combat Forces Underpin Military Modernization appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: The dimensions of the problems confronting Russians are so daunting that many assessments assume that they will sooner or later rise against the regime responsible and force radical change. Observers both inside Russia and abroad have been encouraged by the growing number of protests that have taken place, with the number of popular The post Russians Protesting Mounting Problems, but Not Yet Against Putin appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On September 2, the United States launched Operation Southern Spear, initiating a series of strikes on vessels allegedly trafficking narcotics from Venezuela. By late November, approximately 15,000 U.S. troops had deployed to the region alongside the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier task group (CNN, November 11). Caracas responded by appealing to the People’s The post PRC–Venezuela Relations Endure During U.S. Military Operation appeared first on Jamestown.

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Executive Summary: Recent European delegations to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have prioritized economic and commercial ties, with Europe seeking to balance its trade deficit with the PRC. In September, Peter Kyle, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Business and Trade attended the U.K.-China Joint Economic and Trade Commission (JETCO), which was the The post Concessions Unlikely as Xi Hosts Western Leaders appeared first on Jamestown.

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Executive Summary: On November 5, during a special session of the Russian Security Council, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov justified preparations for potential nuclear tests, citing Moscow’s view that U.S. actions undermine strategic stability. The Kremlin emphasizes the need to maintain the ability to inflict “unacceptable damage” on adversaries under any conditions (President of Russia, November The post Russia Transitions to Nuclear Intimidation appeared first on Jamestown.

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