In his new book, Ian Johnson features Chinese historians who record the darkest episodes of Communist Party rule. The current president of China, Xi Jinping, calls alternatives to the state-sponsored narrative of Communist rule “historical nihilism.” For Xi, Chinese Communism is “the conclusion of history.”
Read MoreThere were 200 synagogues in Latvia before World War II. Peitav-Shul is the only synagogue building to have survived both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations of Riga. The bright blue interior, built in 1905, is decorated with Egyptian and Assyrian-Babylonian geometric patterns. The Aron Kodesh (the Holy Ark), where the Torah scrolls are kept, faces Jerusalem. A marble pulpit faces the congregation.
Read MoreForeign aid is not a cure-all for Africa according to experts and leaders from Africa who spoke at a recent conference in New York City. Rather, they suggest foreign aid is only part of the panacea alongside a more holistic dose of self-reliance, good governance, entrepreneurship and transcendent spiritual values.
Read MoreIn Kenya, an especially noxious scandal involved “pastors” making robocalls to people promising miracles in exchange for donations. The harder the miracle, the larger the donation. In 2014, in the wake of a fake miracle spree, the government of Kenya tried to sharply curtail the freedom of fake pastors to operate.
Read MoreAmerican journalists have been fascinated by Kalenjin runners for decades, and their explanations for Kenyan dominance in running have included training, culture, biology and diet. However, one factor remains little explored or understood in media coverage: The spiritual lives of the Kalenjin runners have received scant attention.
Read More(REVIEW) Justice John Marshall Harlan was the sole defender of civil rights in a series of 1883 Supreme Court cases. In a new book, Peter Canellos argues that Harlan’s distinctive moral values came from his deeply held religious faith, commitment to the founding ideals and personal experience, including inspiration from his biracial brother.
Read More(REVIEW) America’s White underclass suffers from many of the same social problems as its Black urban counterparts. National Review journalist Kevin Williamson documents what he calls the Big White Ghetto, where he grew up, to illustrate how both Republicans and Democrats are promoting a narrative of White victimization rather than an ethic of personal responsibility.
Read MoreWood joins a chorus of historians who see the New York Times’s 1619 Project as a failed effort to reframe American history and with “1620” makes the case that the Mayflower Compact inaugurated the American experiment in democracy. “If the 1619 Project were a term paper, any knowledgeable, fair-minded teacher would give it an F,” Wood writes. The project’s lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize.
Read More(OPINION) Coronavirus is not the world’s first pandemic. The Black Death in the 14th century brought sweeping changes in Europe: the loss of people to the plague gutted the Church of its most faithful clergy, allowed survivors in lower classes to fill higher social positions and even encouraged innovation to replace the lost human labor with machines, including the printing press that made possible the Protestant Reformation.
Read MoreIn a remote part of the Guatemalan highlands, Israeli businesses are creating jobs and wealth for Guatemalan youth. The Israeli-Latino alliance relies on the prominence of evangelical faith in Guatemalan politics and culture that sees Israel as an important ally, even as locals worry whether Israeli backpackers are a bad influence on their kids.
Read MoreThe 2019 documentary, now airing on PBS, follows a Somali father’s quest to understand why his American-born son tried to join ISIS in Syria.
Read More(REVIEW) R.R. Reno is one of America’s most prominent Roman Catholic public intellectuals. In his new book, he writes an eloquent but unAmerican defense of American populism.
Read MoreA group of Yazidi journalists visited the Religion Unplugged offices in New York, hosted by the U.S. State Department, to talk about the current state of affairs in Iraq for the persecuted people group.
Read MoreBrenton Tarrant is becoming a sickeningly familiar figure in the modern West: an angry, disaffected, lone wolf who finds purpose and community online with extremists who offer an escape from the wrenching dislocations of modernity through a blood-soaked path to redemption. His manifesto resembles a ISIS recruitment video, giving a heroic and cosmic meaning to an apocalyptic act of terror.
Read MoreOne million people of China’s Uighur population have been incarcerated in a growing number of “political re-education” camps. The thirty-one camps encompass more than 2 million square meters and function as prisons in what’s described as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
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