Essays

Given that Obama’s strategy is incoherent and will not work at achieving a specific goal, whether that goal is stopping ISIS or removing Assad, American voters should consider the three alternative options proposed at Brookings on November 16.

Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of any particular policy, it seems clear that there is a deep division between the worlds of policy making and the worlds of moral reflection.

This is a war for civilization

“liberté, égalité, fraternité”

With student protests at the University of Missouri resulting in the resignation of that school’s president and concerns about Halloween costumes at Yale sparking a national debate about the commensurability of deeply held values such as free speech and anti-racism, the American conversation about what colleges and universities can and should promise students has entered a moment of reignited intensity. A similar conversation is raging in South Africa.

The Obama White House seems blithely unaware that one of America’s most important partners in the struggle to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) and alleviate the refugee crisis in Europe—Turkey, a member of NATO—is on the brink of a political meltdown that could end its experiment in liberal democracy.

It is not “the military” nor “the government” that will be primarily responsible for the production of knights – of just warriors. Rather, it is, above all, the family, and, secondarily, our places of worship, our schools, our civic institutions – all those relational associations that fill the space between the individual and the state and make up civil society. Impeding this, and lurking in the background of this project, is the civil-military relations of our land.

After the deadly assault on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which saw jihadists execute writers, artists and janitors in retaliation for the paper’s publication of crude cartoons mocking Muhammad, the Paris-based publication is facing regular death threats. Freedom of speech is under threat.

Providence aims to rediscover Protestant tradition and to unearth some of those resources as they relate to international affairs and the vocation of the state and how we would counsel America as a great power to perform on the world stage.