Send us a text Biden carried Georgia by just under 12,000 votes. They had a Republican governor and Republican Secreatary of State. Trump called them and asked them to "find" those votes. I just need one more than Biden got to carry the state. Trump threatened the Secretary of State with prosecution if he did not "find" the votes. The county prosecutor Fannie Wills charged the president with corruption. Trump fought furiously. In time, Wills was remov...

Send us a text After the catastrophic defeat at Charleston, the Patriot forces were on the ropes. General Clinton, commander of the British army, was so confident of the outcome, that he left his deputy, General Cornwallis, in charge and headed north. Cornwallis planned to link up with Tory militias from North and South Carolina, to crush resistance, and to remove two more stars from the flag. (The British already controlled Georgia, at least they thought they d...

Send us a text Christa Bruhn was my student back in the 1980s. I remember very well the first time I met her. She told me she had lived for a semester in Gaza. I have been to Gaza twice and did not consider it a place for a young American woman to be spending a semester. But Christa was never able to get Palestine out of her soul. This is her own story of her life-long engagement with a land and a people whose survival is not guaranteed. In time she fell i...

Send us a text I have been an expert witness in four deportation hearings. The job of an expert witness is to given the judge reasons to permit the individual to remain in the U. S. The cases were people from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. The Palestinian case was the most interesting because it dealt with a stateless person. I also want to share with you a conversation I had with an Immigration judge.

Send us a text This is a bit different from my typical podcast. This is four stories inspired by religion. The story of Rachel and Rebecca, and the mandrake. (You have never read this story so you know nothing about the mandrake (or even what it is). The Story of my close brush with the Rapture. (I will admit. I brought it on myself). The story of the first (?) female pope. So you have never heard of Pope Joan. Well, you will now learn ab...

Send us a text Bruno Bauer, an intellectual colleague of Marx, wrote two essays to which Marx reacted strongly. The first was called “The Jewish Question” (Die Judenfrage), the second “On The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free.” Marx wrote two essays responding to Bauer’s work, using the same titles. The group of intellectuals of which Marx and Bauer were a part were debating how to achieve freedom (emancipation). Bauer saw Jews in terms of the Jewish relig...

Send us a text This is a public talk I delivered on the concept of genocide and the arguments presented in the South African genocide charge against Israel in late 2023. Several people who wanted to attend but could not asked if it could be recorded. We tried, but somehow that did not work out. To the extent possible I tried to be scholarly and analytical in this talk. But how can we be scholarly and detached and analytical when we see Miss Rachel singing "hop li...

Send us a text There are extremist groups in Israel that trace their origins to Rabbi Meir Kahane. Today they control the balance of power in the Israeli cabinet. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are the most prominent personalities. Both are extremely violent and are determined to complete the conquest of what they see as their homeland. And the removal of what they see as alien populations. Smotrich just announced that there will be 3,400 housing units in the E-1 b...

Send us a text This is Part II of a project I developed for my Honors Class. I typed up the opening paragraphs of scores of memoirs in my personal library. My students would read these and discuss them. They really liked this assignment. Part I (American authors) was posted earlier. This is Part II, international authors. If you listened to Part I, you can skip the first minute or two (introduction) and go directly to Karen Blixen, Out of Africa.

Send us a text Jane and I recently went to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. This was the place where John Brown, in October of 1859, conducted his famous strike against slavery. Brown and all of his men were killed, which he anticipated might happen. So why did he engage in such a seemingly-futile action? In the bookstore I saw a biography of Brown written by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1909. Du Bois was the greatest Black intellectual of the 20th century and this book shows wh...

Send us a text I sometimes tell people that I am a recovering racist. It is not really my fault. I grew up in a culture (the 1950s in the border South) when that was just the way things were. The outward and visible sign of our moral failure was that word. You know the one I mean. We used that word without even thinking of it. It was just the word we used. But as I went to college and had two Black room mates, and then lived in Kenya for two years, wh...

Send us a text Today, June 15, is not only Father's Day. It is also Trinity Sunday. To me, the concept of the Trinity is incomprehensible. Which is why I am the perfect person to explain it to the rest of you. This podcast started twenty years ago when one of my Muslim students asked me to explain it to her. She should have asked me to explain E=MC Square. Oh, I can do that: "Matter exploded equals energy and this led to the atomic bomb. Is that rig...

Send us a text In June of 2024 I spent eight days in occupied Palestine, i.e., the West Bank. It is now a year later and I thought this report might deserve a reposting. I went with a group of people who had religious connections. I was the only secular academic. I found this a valuable approach, to be with people who saw this conflict in such a different way. This is a report on what I saw and what I concluded. Note that this is Part I of my report...

Send us a text This is the last lecture I delivered in my academic career. I discovered that I had miscalculated the end of the semester and that I had an extra class. I did have a regular academic topic but my wife said, "You are a senior professor. You have taught 48 years. Your students see you as someone who has had a life time of experiences. They will forget an academic lecture but they will not forget your personal stories. Why not tell them about th...

Send us a text Why I Killed Gandhi by Nathuram Godse Two employees of the Israeli Embassy in D. C. were shot to death this week (May, 2025) . The Manifesto of the shooter shows him to be very distressed by the mass death in Gaza. He felt what is called "the moral imperative to act." So did the person who killed Gandhi. This is a discussion of that person's manifesto. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. In the two movies I have seen, the assassin is port...

Send us a text I was amazed at how much information is available on the internet about this election. Of course, biographical information is public, but the cardinals swear an oath of secrecy before they go into the conclave. And yet somehow information leaks out. I wish I could say I had a cardinal-friend who shared insights with me, but all of this 2025 Conclave stuff comes from the internet. Please forgive me for mispronouncing the name of the Cardinal of Jerusalem....

Send us a text This was an orientation lecture in my course on Religion and Politics. It does have a few of those classroom comments ("don't forget to turn in your papers" sort of things), but otherwise it has quite a bit of information about sometimes confusing topics. Don't forget to check out my recent podcasts on Leo XIII and my own candidacy for pope. I did not get the nod but you can see that I raised the right issues (and maybe even influenced the outcome).

Send us a text Are you interested in why the new pope took the name of an old pope? Is he sending us a message? Leo XIII was a modernizing pope whose most famous encyclical (1891) was called Rerum Novarum (New Things). This is a class lecture that I delivered on that encyclical. I discussed key passages and why it was so important.

Send us a text Back in 2013, when Pope Benedict stepped down, I was concerned for the future of the Church and threw my hat into the ring. I am not sure how many votes I got but the vigorous insistence of the Vatican that they had never heard of me convinced me that my impact was real. There were even rumors that my candidacy had been received better than some had expected. At that point I thought my religious career was over but when I heard that President Trump had declare...

Send us a text This is a duplicate n interview with Adel Bsesio regarding the Bsesio family deeds and documents, now an archive. This family had extensive holdings in southern Palestine that were confiscated by the Israelis in 1948. They are now housed in an archive avilable at the Columbia University library. This is a fascinating story. Sorry I posted this twice.