Religion

Last Monday, President Bush sought to revive his flagging support among religious conservatives by endorsing a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. In his remarks to a group of evangelical activists, the president portrayed supporters of the amendment as defenders of tradition. Yet, ironically, the strength of Christian conservatism in the U.S. derives less from deep roots in tradition than it does from America's uniquely unrooted and fast-changing culture. We are the most churchgoing Western nation -- 43% of… more

"Yesterday, I was hysterical," the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he'd allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci's town house, on the Upper East Side. Big mistake. "I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to," she added. It called to mind what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing her for Playboy, in 1981:… more

Here's a question: Why do Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Civil Liberties Union, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page have such similar views on immigration?

The answer is that all four of the above -- Mahony, CAIR, the ACLU, and the Journal -- have chosen universalism over nationalism. The four embrace different visions of universalism, to be sure, but each one of them is similar insofar… more

While many books have been written on post war Iraq, only a handful have been by writers who speak Arabic and --until now--none by a writer who has had direct access to the insurgents. Nir Rosen’s new book fills this important gap. The New America Foundation is pleased to host the first DC event featuring Rosen, author of the forthcoming In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.

The title of… more

Earlier this year, Muhammad Zaki Amawi and Marwan Othman el-Hindi, Jordanianborn U.S. citizens, and Wassim I. Mazloum, a Lebanese citizen, stood in a federal district court in Ohio, accused of conspiring to wage jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq. According to the indictment against them, Amawi had flown to Jordan last August carrying laptop computers that he intended to donate to the mujahidin in Iraq. Amawi, the indictment stated, had "unsuccessfully attempted to enter Iraq to wage violent jihad, or… more

WASHINGTON — A newly released audiotape attributed to Osama bin Laden urges Muslims to prepare for a long war in Sudan and attacks the U.S. and European cutoff of aid to the Palestinian government, now controlled by the militant group Hamas, as proof of "a Zionist-crusaders' war on Islam." ...

Peter Bergen, an expert on Bin Laden and one of the few Westerners who have interviewed him, said in an interview that the subject matter of the latest communication was "not… more

Len Nichols, a highly respected healthcare economist, directs the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to expand health insurance coverage to all Americans while reining in costs and improving the efficiency of the overall health care system. Before joining New America, Dr. Nichols was the Vice… more

Afshin Molavi is the author of Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran (Norton, 2002), which was nominated for the Thomas Cook literary travel book of the year and described by Foreign Affairs as “a brilliant tableau of today’s Iran.” A former Dubai-based correspondent for the Reuters news agency and a regular… more

Robert Wright is Editor in Chief of Bloggingheads.tv and the author of The Moral Animal (Pantheon, 1994), Nonzero (Pantheon, 2000), and The Evolution of God (Little, Brown, 2009). He is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a contributor to Time and Slate. He has also written… more

Rev. Dr. David E. Gray directs the New America Foundation's Workforce and Family Program, which researches and develops solutions to social, economic and family policy issues.