Every crusade was both more and less than a religious war. No one had a monopoly on brutality, and economic motivations mattered as much as religious ones.
Fiction is hard. Nonfiction is hard for different reasons: the need to ensure accuracy, the risk of angering your subjects. But both require writing talent.
This year seems unusual, both for the number and scale of protests across the world. What links them is the growing demand for greater income equality.
The bishops’ insistence on abortion as the preeminent political issue reveals their resistance to Pope Francis’s call to serve the common good in all its complexity.
The territory along the Syrian-Turkish border is the ancestral homeland of an ancient tradition of Aramaic-speaking Christianity. They’ve been betrayed before.
