terrorism

When Sean O'Callaghan joined the IRA, nationalism was his religion. Later he saw how it poisoned his soul.

When I fly I smile a lot, type only in English, and pretend I'm not reading a book about the rise of ISIS.

Bacevich provides another case of the fraught dream of managing history that Reinhold Niebuhr critiqued.

I went to church full of dread after the recent terrorist attacks. Worship included dedicating a new pipe organ. Was it appropriate to be celebrating in the midst of the hatred and fear?

As Rusty Foster would say, the takes are in. Everyone’s got something to say about global terrorism, ISIS, and refugees, and some of it is even worth reading.

If you’re only going to read one longer piece, I recommend this one by Scott Atran and Nafees Hamid.

With an authorization looming in Congress for our ongoing war against the so-called Islamic State, a muddled conversation has sprung up about the group’s relationship to mainstream Islam, its relationship to American and European policy in the region, and the military and political measures needed to counter it. Graeme Wood interviewed scholars and activists to shed light on what ISIS is trying to accomplish and why. His resulting story—a long tour through the theology, history, and practice of this particularly brutal offshoot of Salafist Islam—is alarming, not least to Wood himself.

So, Sarah Palin said this thing the other day about waterboarding and baptism. I wouldn’t bother bringing it up just to say that I, like so many others, find this disgusting. 

What’s more interesting to me is the diversity of people who are similarly appalled.

“Nairobi has been bombed,” said Amina Bakari, my Kenyan host mother. I'd woken up late that morning 15 years ago.

Drones expose the deficiencies of seeing war as a matter of annihilation. The rules of just war are more crucial than ever. 

In our political climate, security enjoys a peculiar status: it’s an absolute priority, subject to little scrutiny or cost-benefit analysis.

A new WaPo/Pew poll finds that 56 percent of Americans thing it’s acceptable for the National Security Agency to secretly access millions of Americans’ phone records. Sixty-two percent favor investigating terrorist threats “even if that intrudes on personal privacy.”

Do people just not give a damn about privacy anymore, what with their dreams of reality-TV celebrity and their willingness to function as a Facebook or Google product?

Three people died in the attack on the Boston Marathon. That same day, 11 Americans were murdered by guns.

We had a week of frightening headlines as each day greeted us with a new horror. Yet, the chorus soothes my troubled soul as I inhale and imagine God filling me with peace in the midst of all those dreadful dispatches.

When Ross Douthat's right, Ross Douthat's right:

What I hope we don’t see, when the next race or a parade or festival looms up in front of us, are layers of extra stops and searches and checkpoints, wider and wider rings of closed streets, the kind of portable metal detectors that journalists remember unfondly from political conventions, more of the concrete barriers that Washingtonians have become accustomed to around our public buildings … more of everything that organized officialdom does to reassure us, and itself, that soft targets can somehow be eliminated entirely, and that everything anyone can think of is being done to keep the unthinkable at bay.

The show Homeland puts viewers in a moral vice and squeezes.

The TV series Homeland raises some grave real-world questions.

"Terrorism is not nearly as widespread as many people feared it would be after 9/11," says Charles Kurzman.

Of the texts appointed for Sunday, the tenth anniversary of what we now simply call 9/11, the Old Testament reading seems most capable of responding to the range of emotions we may feel as we remember the atrocities of that day.