In Ghana during the week that just ended, Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari, acted the script of late Ghanaian playwright, director, children's author, poet and dramatist, Efua Theodora Sutherland’s The Marriage of Anansewa, to the delight of the crew, Production Director and the benumbed audience. His performance of the legendary drama was so scintillating that Buhari may get a medal, with a probable recommendation that he should be nominated for a Nobel! It was at Ghana’s 61st anniversary and the venue was the Independence Square in Accra. Invited by the Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo as special guest, President Buhari beautifully advertised…

For American evangelicals, there is a term of praise for President Trump that falls like a question mark on most everyone else: “You are Cyrus.” That’s what the Christian pro-Israel activist Mike Evans promised to tell President Trump after his announcement that the United States would move its embassy to Jerusalem. Mr. Evans, who plastered Jerusalem with billboards praising the embassy decision, isn’t the only one to draw a connection to the ancient Persian king. In a 2016 book called “God’s Chaos Candidate,” the minister Lance Wallnau asked, “Could Trump be God’s Cyrus?” Even some Jews have gotten into the…

In the United States, we’ve arrived at a pair of mutually exclusive convictions: that liberal, capitalist democracies are guaranteed by their nature to succeed and that in our Trumpist moment they seem to be failing in deeply unsettling ways. For liberals — and by this I mean inheritors of the long liberal tradition, not specifically those who might also be called progressives — efforts to square these two notions have typically combined expressions of high anxiety with reassurances that, if we only have the right attitude, everything will set itself aright. Hanging on and hoping for the best is certainly…

The Church, right from the medieval times, performed the role of the main stabilizing force in Western Europe. Not only did it provide religious leadership, it also offered the world secular leadership as well. Through the Roman Catholic Church, the Church satisfied the spiritual needs of the medieval society. The Pope, who headed the Roman Catholic Church, offered ordinary folks of the time earthly and spiritual comforts in troubled times. Since it was the largest landholder in Europe at this period, the Church also possessed wide-ranging and significant economic powers. It played a very dominant role in reviving, as well…