Imagine you are Greenland. You are a semiautonomous nation, part of Denmark, doing your Greenland thing with your clusters of colorful houses and glaciers and hot springs when suddenly you find yourself in the midst of a geopolitical controversy courtesy of President Donald J. Trump, who, in the words of one waggish poster on The Hill, is now up to the Louisiana Purchase in the manual on how to be el presidente.
Perhaps the president was thinking of Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, which doubled the United States, or the Alaska purchase of 1867 or President Harry Truman’s overture to buy Greenland for $100 million in gold in 1946 — yeah, I’m sure he was thinking of all of this — when he floated the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark.
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Read MoreIn the aftermath of the bombings of Roman Catholic churches and upscale hotels in Sri Lanka, a poster on The New York Times website gave me pause. I don’t remember the substance of the post or whether it was by a man or a woman but I remember the last line: I choose safety over diversity.
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Read MoreIn a week in which we’ve “rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are (April 15, tax day, having coincided with the beginning of Holy Week, whose end in turn coincided with Passover) — we also continued our discussion of the language and literature of leadership.
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Read MoreAfter a month in which we have seen the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the terror of 14 pipe bombs sent to the Democratic leadership and CNN and the horror of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, we are once again turned in on ourselves to ask – what kind of world are we, what kind of leadership of that world is America providing?
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Read MoreThe grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi – for which the Saudis have now accepted responsibility (sort of) with some cockamamie blame-the-victim scenario – proves Benjamin Disraeli’s Macchiavellian dictum that there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.
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Read MoreIn 1975, James Clavell published “Shōgun,” a blockbuster novel about an English sailor caught up in 17th-century Japan’s feudal, xenophobic power struggles. The novel, which became a hit 1980 miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain, was frank about sex and even franker about violence. But the underlying theme was that of karma and the idea that “karma was always karma.”
We think of karma as fate or destiny. But that is only one aspect of the Eastern principle of cause and effect. What karma says is that what you sow, you shall reap, but not in the eye-for-an-eye way of ancient Judaism. Rather, karma is like physics. I send a pendulum away from me, it comes back with a force equal to that with which I sent it away. …
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Read MoreIn Luke 7: 36-50, the writer paints a portrait of limitless love and the limits of the unloving. Jesus dines at the house of Simon the Pharisee, where a woman known to have led a sinful life washed his feet with her tears, dried them with her hair and anointed them with perfume, an expensive commodity. It was a profound display of contrition, humility and love, though the Pharisees saw it as an extravagant outrage, given her reputation.
After offering a parable, Jesus “turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? …
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