For two days (Sunday and Monday, March 26-27, 2013), the citizens of the city of Rome were called upon to vote. These elections did not have quite the national scale, nor the scope and international relevance, that the February elections possessed -- elections that witnessed the astonishing return (again!) of...

The unexpected announcement by Pope Benedict XVI that he will step down from his pontifical duties on Feb. 28 came as a stunning surprise to media observers and Catholic faithful alike. Predictably, theories about what lay behind the move abound, most of them conspiratorial.

My first inclination in responding...

One of the defining issues over the past several election cycles has been how best to conceive the relationship between local and centralized power in this country. Centralization and de-centralization, regulation and de-regulation: these have been the terms in which a great many contemporary issues have been framed.

On...

My good friend and colleague, Dr. Abbas Barzegar, offered his reflections on the current controversy prompted by the viral spread of the film, "Innocence of Muslims," and what appears to be an almost equally viral spread of violence directed against US embassies and other installations throughout the Middle East.

The...

The Los Angeles Times exposé a couple weeks ago offers chilling testimony of how badly sentiments and moral judgments can slide out of kilter in time of war, or really any time when a sensitive person feels under siege and under threat. The newspaper printed two out of a collection...

While western Christians have completed their celebrations of the Lenten season and Easter, eastern Christians are just gearing up for their own. How did that happen? How did the eastern and western Easters diverge? Curiously, this had something to do with the Roman empire before the advent of Christianity, and...

One of the least remarked aspects of the early Christian reporting of Jesus's death by crucifixion is the following:

Jesus let out a great cry and expired. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom Seeing this, the centurion who was standing near...