Roundup: Media's Take

John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge: God Still Isn't Dead

[Mr. Micklethwait is the editor in chief of the Economist. Mr. Wooldridge is its Washington bureau chief. They are the authors of "God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World," published this week by Penguin Press.] With Easter week upon us, Newsweek's April 13 cover proclaims "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." The new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) shows that the proportion of Americans who claim to have no relig

Ira Stoll: Anti-Semitism and the Economic Crisis

[Mr. Stoll is the author of a biography of Samuel Adams.] Walking down the street in my solidly upper-middle-class New York City neighborhood the other day was a neatly dressed man angrily cursing into his cell phone about "Jew Wall Street bankers." I was headed in the opposite direction and didn't stop to interview him about his particular grievances, but the brief encounter crystallized for me a foreboding that the financial crisis may trigger a new outbreak of

Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith: From Bubble to Depression?

[Mr. Gjerstad is a visiting research associate at Chapman University. Mr. Smith is a professor of economics at Chapman University and the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics.] ... The events of the past 10 years have an eerie similarity to the period leading up to the Great Depression. Total mortgage debt outstanding increased from $9.35 billion in 1920 to $29.44 billion in 1929. In 1920, residential mortgage debt was 10.2% of household wealth; by 1929, it was 27.2% of household wealth

Adam Kirsch: Europe’s Last Man

[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Nextbook.org. He is the author most recently of Benjamin Disraeli.] There are not many moments in history when it is possible to worry that the world has become too happy for its own good. One such moment came in Europe during the late nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic Wars had receded into the distance and the First World War was still hidden over the horizon. For a brief period, it became possible to bel

Jon Meacham: The End of Christian America

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become. It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document afte

Reuel Marc Gerecht: The Return of Weakness ... President Obama means well. Iran doesn't

[Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] In diplomacy and espionage, there is no worse mistake than "mirror-imaging," that is, ascribing to foreigners your own actions and views. For Westerners this is especially debilitating, given our modern proclivity to assume that others pursue their interests in secular, material, and guilt-ridden ways. Confession is an important part of the Western tradition; self-criticism is less acut

Karen Horn: Why Adam Smith Still Matters

John Maynard Keynes is high in the list of bestselling books now. Adam Smith is not quite as popular. The reason is not that books from the 18th century tend to be a demanding read: Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, although from the 20th century, is no piece of cake either. Instead, the present global financial crisis has made the godfather of classical economics look strikingly irrelevant in comparison with Keynes, the inventor of modern disequilibrium theory. Even wor

Georgie Anne Geyer: Seems like old times in Afghanistan

As President Obama and his advisers focus on Europe, Russia and the international economy at the G20 summit, a slowly bleeding wound on the body of American foreign policy is becoming increasingly infected -- and will, in the end, seriously poison his presidency. The wound is Afghanistan. Its present situation reminds those of us who remember Vietnam of those days in the '60s when minds in Washington were elsewhere -- on the nuclear standoff with Russia in Cuba, on President Kennedy's dea

Bill Moyers Interviews William Black: Crime is at the bottom of the financial meltdown

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s. WILLIAM K. BLACK: These numbers

David Neiwert: Glenn Beck warns: 'Fascism is on the rise'

[David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle.]

National Association of Scholars: Regrets Ward Churchill Verdict

PRINCETON, NJ—The National Association expresses its regret over the decision of a Denver jury to find in favor of Ward Churchill in his case against the University of Colorado. Reacting to the decision, NAS Chairman Stephen H. Balch commented: The decision for Churchill will only further attenuate an already fraying relationship between the protections of academic freedom and their corollary obligations. Churchill is the poster boy for academic irresponsibility in both

Bruce Ackerman: We should not look upon presidential lawlessness as if it were an odd aberration of the Bush years.

[Bruce Ackerman is a professor of law at Yale and the author of We the People.] President Barack Obama started strong by announcing the end of torture and the closing of Guantánamo, but he has recently taken a more equivocal attitude toward the Bush constitutional legacy. While rejecting his predecessor's extreme claims, he continues to assert the presidential power to hold terrorists without trial and to keep state secrets from the courts. And he has already issued his first signin

Tony Blankley: The anti-Catholic origins of a first amendment case

[Tony Blankley is executive vice president of Edelman public relations in Washington. He served as Newt Gingrich's press secretary.] ... The dignity of free men and women is a constant moral reproach to those who chose or are compelled not to live in such dignity. And each time a free people suffer some temporary material reversal, such as in 1929 and now, the enemies of individual freedom and liberty offer up some substitute for it that goes by many names but ultimately devolves to

Oliver Marre: Is libel tourism a threat to free speech—or just to neocons?

[Oliver Marre writes for The Observer in London. ] On a recent rainy Friday afternoon, British Member of Parliament the Right Honorable Denis MacShane called my cellphone to offer a word of warning. “Make sure your article is very carefully checked by lawyers before it is printed,” he said. “Dealing with this subject is to swim in dangerous waters.” This article, fittingly enough, is about libel. More specifically, it is about the practice of “libel touri

David Broder: Obama's Muscle Moment

... You can hear in the comments of [Sen.] Levin and other members of Congress the sounds of grudging admiration for a fellow politician who has shown them he has more backbone than they expected [for taking on GM, pushing out Rick Wagoner, and risking displeasure with labor unions and the Democratic state of Michigan]. The most dramatic example of that kind of reappraisal in my experience was supplied by Ronald Reagan in the summer of 1981, his first year as president. PATCO, the u

Malte Lehming: Obama ... Just Another Bush - A German Perspective

[Mr. Lehming is op-ed page editor of Der Tagesspiegel. Belinda Cooper translated this essay from the German.] Is the financial crisis for Angela Merkel what the Iraq war was for Gerhard Schröder -- namely, a reason to seriously strain Germany's relationship with the U.S.? One need not answer with an unconditional "yes" to be very concerned. Naturally, at the G-20 meeting in London this week, Europeans will celebrate and praise the new American president. There

Michael White: London summit ... we've been here before

[Michael White has been writing for the Guardian for over 30 years, as a reporter, foreign correspondent and columnist.] I'm not writing from the press centre at the G20 summit in east London this morning, having seen enough of such events to be happy to stay away. Patrick Wintour, Nick Watt and Andrew Sparrow have been there since pre-dawn for the Guardian's political team. There's a pattern to summit organisation whether it is the EU, G8, Nato, UN, US-USSR (in the old

Jonathan Martin: Obama ... Bush-era diplomacy is over

[Jonathan Martin is a Politico reporter.] Barack Obama devoted much of his inaugural speech and first few days in office to repudiating his predecessor - and it was no different Wednesday when he set foot on the world stage for the first time. On a day of dizzying diplomacy with three world powers, Obama made one thing clear: The Bush era of foreign policy is over. In strokes of symbolism and on issues of substance, the president’s international debut was

Noam Scheiber: A new theory of the AIG catastrophe

What went wrong at AIG? Since the uproar over the firm's bonuses, it's become fashionable to distinguish between the masters of the universe at AIG Financial Products, the subsidiary that nearly torched the global economy, and the working stiffs at the rest of the company. So compelling is this dichotomy, in fact, that even the AIG basher-in-chief has invoked it. "You've got a company, AIG, which used to be just a regular old insurance company," President Obama explained during his rec

Bartle Bull: No, he can't - Obama and the Carter malaise

[Bartle Bull is foreign editor of Prospect.] Barack Obama was always going to disappoint. When you promise almost everything to almost everybody—I’ll stop the fighting in Iraq but I’ll also keep going after al Qaeda there; I’ll make the economy grow more but I’ll spread the wealth around, and so on—you will inevitably let many people down. Human beings, even those who read fluently from teleprompters, simply cannot walk on water. But few expected the wheels to come off