History

In his book “A World Safe for Democracy,” John Ikenberry writes an impassioned defense of liberal internationalism and the international order it helped to create.

America remains the world leader. This fact is naïve to reject and realistic to accept. It is the American Century still.

The Friends of the National World War II Memorial recently announced the charity had received a $2-million grant that will allow the inclusion of President Franklin Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer on the memorial site.

We comfort ourselves, saying, “This is not who we are.” But without deeper reflection, such pat answers are lies, strengthening the “vulgarized knowledge” that allow us to ignore the chasms that threaten to consume us.

The sad and lamentable truth is that indeed this is who we are, for it was members of our own body-politic who did this, and we cannot heal if we do not confront the uncomfortable facts as they are. It was sedition.

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. The Gospels occupy a kind of center point in human culture as a whole: products of a particular time and place, but comprehensible to all.

Conventional manger scenes don’t show it, but besides the ox, the ass, the sheep, and the camels, there was another animal in the room at Christmas: an elephant. And the elephant in the room was the idea that Jesus’ mother was a virgin when He was born.

At a time when some challenge the morality and religious character of America’s first founders, the plain facts of the 1620 Mayflower Compact, a theologically informed social compact for believers and non-believers alike, remind us of the good seeds planted in our shared past.

It is because we desire the good of concord that we fight for a decisive end to conflict, one that secures and allows the enforcement of a durable peace.