Reading Time: 4 minutes Russia—and more pertinently Putin—is threatening Lithuania with non-diplomatic retaliation in reply to the Baltic state’s sanctioning of goods from Russia to its exclave Kaliningrad. As if things weren’t precarious enough to Europe’s east, the situation is on the brink of some frightening escalation. But this is no time to de-escalate. What has happened with Lithuania […]
Ukraine invasion
Posted inWar and Peace
The GOP’s Russian church connection
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Republican Party has a long history of opposition to Russia. They were the leaders in Cold War rhetoric, deploring both the communism and atheism of the Soviet regime. In the early 1950s, The Red Scare, promoted by right-wing Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, warned the American people that communism was creeping into our government. He […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Beyond Ukraine: The global response to (un)civil wars
Reading Time: 6 minutes With Western attention on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s easy to forget the added pain of people from regions where crimes against humanity have been raging all this time. But it’s a whole different level of heartbreak for many to witness European borders suddenly opening wide, stronger sanctions put in place, and international organizations rallying […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Is the Russia-Ukraine conflict quite so clear-cut?
Reading Time: 19 minutes A defining characteristic of the human mind is the drive to oversimplify complex problems. We don’t do nuance and complexity well. Our media map is saturated with easily digestible narratives of good and evil, like the global “War on Terror.” Or Ukraine right now. While I don’t want to victim-blame by proxy, and while Putin […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Archbishop says Putin only wants to ‘reconstruct Christian civilization’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Carlo Maria Viganò—once the papal ambassador to the U.S. among other countries—has claimed that the invasion of Ukraine is an attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to reconstruct “Christian civilization” in Europe. According to Religion News Service, Viganò, in a lengthy letter running to almost 10,000 words, excoriated countries that are “demonizing” Putin and imposing […]
Posted inNews
The last thing Ukraine needs is prayer
Reading Time: 5 minutes Prayer has no effect on reality, and Jesus isn’t returning our calls. Ukraine needs help, but it needs tangible help, not make-believe help.
Posted inGeneral
With Ukraine on fire, no more time for charlatans and fools in this country
Reading Time: 3 minutes The nonsense in American political culture is more clearly revealed as corrupt and absurd, such as the hyperbolic reactions against “tyrannical” mask mandates and the like during a pandemic. You want to know what tyranny is? Ask the Ukrainians who are facing the very real prospect of Putin taking over their country.
Posted inWar and Peace
Why are we so timid in defending Ukraine? It’s MAD.
Reading Time: 5 minutes MAD is the excellent reason why American President Joe Biden—along with the rest of the West—is so seemingly over-cautious in trying to defend Ukraine against the brutal Russian invasion now in progress. MAD is the canny acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, which, in brief, means first to strike, last to die. In other words, few […]
Posted inPolitics
The Ukraine-Russia conflict: Let’s talk about Putin’s endgame
Reading Time: 6 minutes Beyond exclamations of shock and horror, what we need to be talking about as Russia invades Ukraine this morning is Putin’s endgame. Putin claims that he is de-Nazifying Ukraine, and that it is not, despite what the West says, a sovereign nation. I listened to one of his spokespeople on the news claim that it […]