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Send us a text On January 3 American forces went into Caracas and captured Venezuelan President Maduro.  He was taken to the United States to stand trial.  Is this a one-off adventure because of a corrupt leader, or does it suggest a broader set of actions of which this is just the first of many?  

Send us a text When I was in Turkey I visited a caravan serai.  It was a place where a caravan would stop along the way.  (And where travelers could find a place to spend the night).  When we read that there was "no room in the inn" and Mary had to deliver in the stable, what does that mean?  I suspect it was not nearly as harsh as I learned when I was a kid.  Two updates might be helpful First, scholars have not found evidence of a caravan serai in Bethlehem.  Second, scholars believe that many stories in the Bible are metaphors, not facts.  Some scholars believe that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem.  That is more like one of the parables of Jesus, which everyone recognizes is a story designed to make a point 

Send us a text I am very cautious about predictions.  All the pundits are doing those, plus most of them seem to be chasing headines.   I have made an exception in this case, because I think Trump has peaked and is on his decline.   Am I just doing what others are doing and over-reading headlines?  Maybe.  But I think I see something worth noting.  You are welcome to spend 29 minutes see if you agree.  Feedback welcome.  [email protected] 

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 removed for conflict of interest.  (She was boinking one of her associates).  The person who replaced her was a well respected prosecutor.  Today he dismissed the case.  Why?  1.  The case should never have been in a county court.  It should have been in a federal court.  Allowing every county prosecutor to bring criminal charges against a president would produce chaos.  2.  The critical sentence from Trump about "find the votes" could have been interpreted as having criminal intent OR just urging the local official to do his job.  The law specifies that if reasonable people could interpret a statement in two ways, the prosecutor is obligated to grant the accused the benefit of the doubt.  3.  The case was very complex with many individuals named.  It would have involved multiple trials.   4.  Trump is now in office.  It could not go to trial until he was out of office.  That would be very difficult.   What I do not yet understand is what happens to all of the peripheral individuals who already pleaded guilty to being a part of a conspiracy and have been sentenced.  Wills used the RICO law to suggest that there were a host of people involved in this effort.  This podcast will explain the original indictment document, including the logic of the RICO charge.  This is not long and is very informative. 

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 did).   The Tory militias, backed up by some regulars, had gathered at King's Mountain right on the border between North and South Carolina.  They were in a formidable position, holding the high ground.  The plan was to link up with Cornwallis, finish off the rebellion, and go home as heroes.  What could go wrong?  But four battles (Musgrave Mill, Cowpens, King's Mountain, and Guilford Courthouse) changed the tragectory of the war.  We have been watching the Ken Burns masterpiece on The American Revolution.  This story is told in the last episode. 

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 in love with a Palestinian student she met in the US.  She moved with him to Jenin where she became fully integrated into her new Palestinian family.  Christa shares amazing insights from her years in that land.  I found it easy and very rewarding to interview her about her life and her book.  This interview is over an hour long but you will be glad you listened. 

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.  Immigration Attorney Shahad Atiya commented on this podcast:  "Asylum law requires people to contort their fears into categories that sometimes make no sense to the expert observer. For those reasons, for the chemist, it was better for him to be able to select a category to be discriminated against such as religion, rather than fit himself into the catch all category (membership in a particular social group, that being chemists). That category kills many cases. Religion is black and white. What is membership in a particular social group anyway? We litigate this every day. "Although you mention these cases may be in the public record, they may be because of media attention or other ways they were discovered. Generally, asylum records and asylum cases are not discoverable and cannot be FOIA’d. You kept them anonymous though anyway. "Many of the timelines you mentioned for these cases put them under the Obama presidency. This shows that asylum law and its harsh realities know no party lines. "There is a level of privilege from the clients that you were an expert witness for having entered the U.S. legally and then applied after overstaying a visa. However, the privilege quickly fails when credibility is at the center of their case. Their credibility of their claims on the fact that they presented themselves at a port of entry, they held themselves out to be tourists or students or temporary workers or visitors. They told officers they intended to leave the U.S. but all along they had the intent to file for asylum because their claims naturally rest on things they experienced prior to their entry. Had their fear started while they were here, the case would be completely different. They would have a valid fear in the opinion of an officer and thereby now AFTER experiencing such events did their intentions change from nonimmigrant to immigrant. Islam and especially Shias put a lot of emphasis on the intentions you make prior to an act.  I joke about how immigration law can be so Shia."

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 about her.  And the time I threw my hat into the ring when the papacy became vacant.  (I know.  It sounds like a bizarre scheme but the Church was in big trouble and i did not feel that I could just stand on the sidelines and watch it disintegrate).  Then, just for the sake of those not yet offended, I threw in a few atheist jokes.  Enjoy! 

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 religion. While Christians had just to seek freedom, Jews had to go through two steps to achieve freedom, theological and political (universal).  They had to abandon the Torah, and their focus upon themselves, and then join Christians to become politically free.  Bauer thought Jewish political behavior could be completely understood in terms of their ancient teachings.   Marx objected strongly, insisting that the religious issues were superficial and that Bauer had misunderstood the nature of conflict and freedom. These two essays were published in limited circulation and fell from public view when the 1848 uprising failed to achieve democracy and Marx fled into exile. They were only republished (along with several others) after World War II and are commonly called The 1844 Manuscripts or The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. These few manuscripts show a very different Marx from the Cold War image.  He was  someone interested in religion and human development. (Note: The first American publication used the title “A World Without Jews,” a term Marx never used, and which sounded very ominous in the aftermath of the Jewish holocaust.              I did this as a class lecture in my Religion and Politics class.  It was a valuable lecture because not a single student had ever heard of these essays.  I hesitated to turn the lecture into a podcast but once I had a text of the lecture, I saw that it had potential and decided to adapt it to podcast format.   I frequently asked students to write a two-page reaction paper (not graded) about how they thought about the lecture.  Almost universally, they liked this lecture because it taught them some things they did not know.  One of my students, a couple of decades ago, offered a unique perspective.  He was a trained Islamic scholar.  He said he had been trained in Koranic studies.  He knew the Koran and the Hadith (opinions and stories from the life and example of Mohammed).  to him those things were very important.  But he now understood that Muslims were also a community of people who lived in the real world.  Much of their behavior could be understood by thinking in that context.  His was a reaction that many students had.   Glitch:  Around nine minutes in I accidentally hit the keyboard.  This required some editing.  If you notice a jump around that point, this is why.    

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 little bunny" as a three-year-old Palestinian child dances gleefully around on her new artificial legs?  And the evening news (if you watch a good source) is beyond distressing.  There are times when I think of that line from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:  "The horror!  The horror!   I have delivered this talk three times, once at a university, once at a church, and once at a retirement community.  In all three cases, the audience was open and responsive, and the post-talk discussion was serious and engaging.  I hope you find this talk helpful.  Also, I delivered a full hour-long podcast discussion of that South African document soon after it was filed with the High Court of Justice in the Hague. 

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 bloc, the last remaining empty space in the zone surrounding Jerusalem.  As he said, correctly, this will mean the end of the idea of a Palestinian state.    Kahane was born in Brooklyn but moved to Israel and was elected to the Knesset.  Polls showed him increasing to four seats in the coming election.  But he was assassinated during a fund-raiser rally in New York.    I heard Kahane speak twice in the Detroit area in the early 1980s.  I also read two of his books, Time to Go Home and They Must Go!  They were chilling  I also read quite a few essays by him.  Kahane believed that the Palestinians must be kicked out, and that the American Jews must flee before the American Holocaust starts.  It is not a matter of if, but when, that occurs.  He said that the only reason for a Jew to be in America was to help other Jews to leave.  It is no surprise that those two things -- remove the Palestinians, replace them with Jews -- were linked.   Kahane believed that anything is justified to bring the new age and to save the Jews.  I thought of the accusations by radical Iraqi Jews that the 1952 bombings of synagogues were done by Zionist commandos in an effort to panic Iraqi Jews to flee  to Israel.  I have no way to know if those accusations are correct but such a thing would surely be justified by Kahane.  He was filled with hatred of Arabs, Americans and secular Jews.  He believed in his cause and would do anything to achieve it.  He had a definite support base in the American Jewish community, although certainly not nearly as great as those who were hostile to him.  I don’t want to be inflammatory but I wrote in my notes back in the 1980s that I felt I was in a Munich beer hall in 1924 listening to Hitler polish up a speech.  I have never heard anyone quite like him.  And today his followers are prominent members of the Israeli cabinet.  

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 why.  It is a remarkable book, beautifully written, and filled with speeches, notes on meetings, documents.  I came away with a very different view of Brown than I had previously held.   If you would like to read the book, you will be glad you did.  Meanwhile, here is my assessment of Brown, based upon what Du Bois wrote. 

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, where all of my students were Black and I was often the only white person around, my way of thinking began to change.   This is a personal story, but it is really a story of how America changed.  And  after I wrote up my thoughts, I posted on Facebook the story of my struggles and asked my friends and former students to share their experiences and reactions. Their contributions are part of the podcast. I  think you will find this podcast of some interest.  And perhaps it will help those of you who are overseas to understand a bit about how we Americans, with our terrible history of racial injustice, struggle with our past. 

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 right?"  Well, Einstein probably had a bit more to say about it than a struggling human being like me.  The same is true with theology.  If God is incomprehensible then all explanations of God are simply human efforts to put into words that which is not subject to words or even understanding.   If that last sentence upset you, then you may not want to listen to this podcast.  If it intrigued you, then you are invited to spend the next half hour walking through a theological mine field with me.  (And to go to my podcast on Feuerbach, who discussed this concept in great depth).   But as I often told my students, you are probably better off not discussing some of these topics at the dinner table.  We are engaging in an intellectual process.  You know you are not being asked to change what you believe.  Just to understand some perspectives that may be new to you.  Not everyone will be where you are.  There is no reason to upset people with difficult ideas.  Are you ready?  Seat belt on?  Here we go.