As the North Korean government announces the death of Kim Jong-il, the future of the "hermit kingdom," along with its 25 million people, remains largely uncertain. It is no secret that life under the Dear Leader was no picnic. Just this month, over 40 human rights organizations, marking...

"Shoot! I am telling you, shoot! Shoot and run!" Seelan bellowed. Seelan was demanding that his childhood friend Aruna kill him and escape. Aruna saw tears in Seelan's eyes as Aruna pointed the gun and fired. Seelan collapsed dead.

A sudden death in the small village of...

As my doctoral dissertation deals with Sri Lankan Tamil activism in Canada, I was asked by a few people why I had not yet weighed in on the recent Channel 4 documentary, Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, which in conjunction with the United Nations Report released in...

The fear of the sellout is rampant among many ethnic and racial groups in the United States and Canada. When members of these communities enter positions of privilege, they indeed become objects of pride and admiration, but these feelings are often accompanied by a nervous uncertainty as to whether they...

With news last week that Pitzer College, a small liberal arts college in California, is instituting the first ever major in "secular studies," it is clear that sociologists need to catch up with what is rapidly becoming a "movement" of sorts. It goes without saying that the study...

In 1968, Avery Brundage, President of the International Olympic Committee, declared that sports, "like music and the other fine arts, transcends politics." The statement came out of a sentiment of hope rather than fact, and was, of course, incredibly naive. If Claude von Clausewitz is correct that war is merely...

This article is co-authored with Rory Dickson (doctoral candidate, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)

With faint echoes of Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities of the early 1950s, Republican congressman Peter King begins hearings on radicalization among American Muslims this week. To be sure, there is a...

Over the past month, there has been some speculation among members of the global Tamil community on whether Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa visited Texas to obtain cancer treatment in secret. The story in itself is not particularly interesting, but it does have relevance for the post-conflict situation in Sri...

The positive enthusiasm garnered by the writings of the New Atheists evidences a growing sentiment in North America about organized religion and the role it should play in the public square, especially when it comes to setting public policy and legislation. The enthusiasm is a reaction to what many feel...

As terrorism expert Marc Sageman wrote in his book Leaderless Jihad, "The growth of the internet has dramatically transformed the structure and dynamic of the evolving threat of global Islamist terrorism by changing the nature of terrorists' interactions. The nature of this influence is still misunderstood both by...

Many sociologists of religion, as well as the general public, seem to take for granted the causal relationship between higher education and the decline of religion. The more educated someone becomes, the theory goes, the less religious they are likely to be. As European and American universities broke free from...

Israel's oldest newspaper Haaretz recently reported that David Irving is leading a group of supporters who have each paid around £2000 (about $3160) to take part in an eight-day tour of wartime sites in Poland. Their itinerary includes visits to the "Wolf's Lair," Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters, and...

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"
- Benjamin Franklin

There has recently been a lot of talk and a lot written about global warming. Increasingly, skeptics are coming to realize that global warming is not a political issue. I used to often hear the question...

In his much publicized appearance on Crossfire on October 15, 2004, Jon Stewart accused Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala of "hurting America." When Carlson responded that Stewart himself rarely asks tough questions during his interviews, Stewart argued that The Daily Show cannot be held to the same standard...

If Americans are sick of seeing Westboro Baptist Church members at the funerals of dead soldiers, they can rest a little easier. While they are not entirely retiring picket signs reading "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," church members have recently printed a few different ones: "The Jews Killed Jesus" and...