Mark's Blog

At a gathering in the White House just before Easter, President Trump was lauded, if not anointed, with the words, “you are the greatest champion of the faith that we have ever seen in a President.”  So spoke Paula White-Cain, the President’s chief spiritual advisor,...

“Let’s Make a Deal” is a day-time game show that has been running on TV off and on since 1963. “The Art of the Deal”, a book ghost written by Tony Schwartz for Donald Trump in 1987, immediately landed on the best seller list, where it remained for nearly a year, and...

“We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age where they belong”. “All Hell will reign down”. So President Trump has said and written in the last few days as the bombardment of Iran continues.  Many of us viscerally recoil at the wanton illegality, the unbridled...

Fifteen years ago, I was on a tour of Robben Island in South Africa, the prison where Nelson Mandela was jailed for most of his 27 years in captivity. The tour guide was a former prisoner who had been locked up for writing a letter to his local newspaper questioning...

Deus Vult. God wills it, in Latin. That was a rallying cry in 1095 when Pope Urban made plans to dispatch a Christian army to expel Muslims from Jerusalem. It was the first Crusade.There were seven Crusades in all over the next 200 years, most of them failures.  But...

  It was a moment of epic furry. I was with a group of my college freshmen classmates at the fraternity where we had just been accepted as pledges. I was invited upstairs into a member’s room, and as soon as I entered, I was set upon by three fraternity...

Responsibility to Protect. R2P. Responsibility to Protect a doctrine that was endorsed by all UN member states at the 2005 World Summit. After the genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, there was a developing global commitment to require nations to...

Bombs fell across Iran over the weekend. The assault continues. The impact of these attacks have been felt across the globe. Loss of life, and military machinery in Iran itself, and an array of anxiety, grief, anger, fear, and in some cases celebration, in Iran and...

“We move at the speed of trust.” So said my friend and colleague Shaykh Ibad Wali who is the Senior Muslim Advisor for the One America Movement. He and other national leaders from faith250 and Braver Faith (a department of Braver Angels) are working together to design...