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Will the Southern Baptists’ point man in Washington lose his key demographic—journalists?

As Egyptian protests rock the casbah, the U.S. responds with cautious words and a noncommittal position. What are the risks if the Egyptian people don’t feel that America is supportive of their struggle?

King’s fundamentally religious message of the requirements of justice have been confused, or perhaps deliberately distorted, by those who want to claim his support for their cause.

Not everyone on the religious right believes that Lila Rose is acting out God’s will, let alone laying down her life. After all, Lila Rose lies in order to get the footage she seeks.

The tragedy of a dictatorship is that they so eviscerate their countries that, even after they are gone, it’s hard for people to pick up the pieces and move forward. But I am hopeful in seeing the banner of the pre-Qaddafi monarchy rooted in the Sufi orders that led the resistance to colonialism.

It is easy to blame the war machine or the pornography industry, but the more mundane problem is with our addiction to visual thrills. What some people see as a lack of moral vision (watching a porn video, for example) is perhaps better approached as an amoral astigmatism, a lazy eye, a privileging of the visual over our other evolved senses. The thrill of watching may mingle with compassion for those being harmed, but unless you as a viewer do something to actually alleviate that suffering, you are only a voyeuristic addict, entranced by the power of the gaze.

According to Vatican representative Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, ending discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgender persons would make those who oppose such human rights the real victims.

A consciousness change is happening in Syria, a country of twenty-three million that has been brutalized under Martial Law since 1963. My parents left in 1971 with their children, including me, because the repression of civil liberties had already become intolerable. The sense of helpless terror became so ingrained among Syrians that relatives who remained in Syria spoke only in hushed tones and coded words about the brutality of the state—even, incredibly, when they were visiting us in our suburban U.S. home, miles from the reach of any Syrian state police agent.

The conflation of Geronimo with bin Laden once again illustrates the failure of the U.S. to consider its own history in fighting insurgent wars.

The assassination of Osama bin Laden has revived the so-called torture debate. Even if it did help in his capture (which it didn’t), torture is still wrong.