Walter Russell Mead

Walter Russell Mead

Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, and the Distinguished Scholar in American Strategy and Statesmanship for the Hudson Institute. He previously served as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy for the Council on Foreign Relations. His works include God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2008), and he is the Global Views Columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

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Yule Blog Day 1: Christmas Gift!
Day 1: Christmas Gift!

The manger scene these days really is the face of Christmas for most people and, perhaps not surprisingly, it is one of the aspects of the season that people resent and fight.

Yule Blog - Walter Russell Mead
The Thirteen Posts of Christmas: 2018–19 Edition

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care at the ancestral Mead mansion; and as I settle down for a long winter’s rest, I am taking a break from politics and war, sort of, to yet another run of our good old-fashioned Yuletide blog.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD LECTURE: “CHRISTIAN REALISM”
Walter Russell Mead Lecture: “Christian Realism”

Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, lectured at Providence’s Christianity and National Security Conference on November 2, 2018.

American Power and the Ways the World Ends
American Power and the Ways the World Ends

Are we, in fact, seeking through foreign policy to protect ourselves from a pre-millennial apocalypse—or, perhaps, to bring about a post-millennial one? The intellectual and spiritual resources of Protestant Christianity have a great deal to add to this debate. But up until now, I haven’t seen much evidence that these resources have yet been brought to bear on these questions.

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Day 13: The Light at the End of the Yule Blog

The Christmas season ends on a high note, with the Feast of the Epiphany—also known as Three Kings’ Day, the day on which Christians traditionally commemorate the visit of the Three Wise Men to the infant Christ.

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Day 12: How Real is the Meaning?

History turned a corner with the birth of Jesus Christ, and while the written reports of that event don’t tell me everything I want to know, they do tell me everything I need.

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Day 11: Sitting in Darkness, Blogging the Light

Whatever the risks of having it in, if we leave religion out of our national conversation, we end up with a vapid conversation that doesn’t address the deepest realities that move most of the people in this country.

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Day 10: The Mother of All Meaning

To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary.

Day 09: God’s Dilemma

The flawed human race, trapped in a cycle of cascading pain and wrong is what, and who, God is bound and determined to love; the question is how can He do it?

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Day 08: One for All

The Christmas story suggests that we can somehow try to be loyal members of our nations, our families, our tribes—and also to reach out to the broader human community of which we are also a part.