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.

Send us a text My former student, Amine Zreikh, contacted me about an archive of deeds from pre-1948 Palestine, and the effort to create a site where those could be stored. I conducted three interviews on this project. One with Zreikh and two are with Adel Bsesio, the custodian of those documents. He tells how he created the site and how researchers and other interested people can have access to them. This is interview ONE of THREE.

Send us a text This is interview three on this remarkable project. The frist interview was with Amine Zreikh who made me familiar with this historical cache of documents -- deeds, maps, contracts, etc. Adel Bsesio is the posessor of his family archive. It is now in an archive in Columbia University, universally accessible to anyone who wants to use it for research or educational purposes. This interview focuses upon the archive itself, and the rich store of materials t...

Send us a text Just after being released from the hospital, where he nearly died, the Pope issues a pastoral letter to the American Bishops. He urged them to focus upon Christian principles, and to support immigrants as they face the actions of the Trump administration (which they did not identify by name). He said that a policy not rooted in proper values will start badly and end badly. This is a short letter, just 2 and 1/2 pages long. I offer some explanatory commen...

Send us a text There is a new book on the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983. 241 people were killed as they slept. It was the greatest single-day death toll for the Marines since Iwo Jima. The decision to put these Marines in Lebanon in the middle of a civil war was veery controversial. The Joint Chiefs and the National Security Council were on opposite sides. Jane and I attended a talk on this incident by the author of the book. I was...

Send us a text This is an IDF assessment of what happened on October 7, 2023, what went wrong, and why. It is a military report, not a political assessment, but it is very interesting.

Send us a text My colleagues and I held a Faculty Forum when the Ukraine War started. It was done soon after Russia grabbed some provinces and the Crimean peninsula in 2014. This is my contribution. I listened to it when the current war started and found it still worth the time. With the current confrontation, and the Trump shift towards Russia, it may be of interest to see some of the long-term issues. This was reposted once before, about a year or so ago,...