Walter Russell Mead

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.

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.

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.

My goal is much more modest: to help Christian and non-Christian readers understand what classical vanilla Christians mean when they identify the baby in the manger with God on high. That means taking on the most controversial and complex idea in Christianity; the doctrine of the Trinity is wrapped around that baby in the manger even tighter than the swaddling clothes.

After Japan’s surrender 75 years ago, McCulloch implored Christians and governments to affirm “the dignity of the human person as the image of God” because this principle could determine the world’s fate.

Colin Dueck’s “Age of Iron: On Conservative Nationalism” presents a sophisticated outlook on the future of Republican foreign policy.

Here are some of the top books to help you understand the history of American foreign policy.

Though Mead’s talk was focused on bipartisanship in American foreign policy, he had news for the audience: American foreign policy has rarely ever stopped “at the water’s edge.”

In Safe Passage, Kori Schake details how transitions in geopolitical power lead to violence, except when the United States slowly and peacefully took over the hegemonic role Great Britain played.