Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, August 13

by Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

CHRISTIANS IN CHINA: A short essay on the explosive growth in the last 60 years. A short video and article on the  campaign to remove crosses.

INDIA: WILL IT EVER BE STATES UNITED? Reform by Modi.

THE DEATH OF YEMEN’S CHILDREN: From 'Foreign Policy Report':

"United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki­-moon came under withering criticism earlier this year after bowing to threats by Saudi Arabia to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in U.N. funding unless it removed Riyadh from a blacklist of armies, rebels, and terrorists that maim or kill children in conflict zones. But on Tuesday Ban pushed back, 'telling delegates at a special U.N. Security Council session on the plight of children in armed conflict that he has ongoing concerns about abuses of children in Yemen. The United Nations, he added, stands behind its claim that the Saudi­-led military coalition in Yemen was responsible for some 60 percent of the 1,953 child deaths and injuries there during the past year.' The Saudis, predictably, were not happy."

Saudi options in Yemen by Bruce Reidel.

FRENCH PRIEST MARTYRED: His last words to his killers. A Christian duty to defend by Father George Rutler. His last words define the war by defining the enemy. AOA on Pope saying religions are not at war.

THE RIGHT TO CARRY, AND HOMELAND SECURITY: When will we get over the run, hide, then maybe fight syndrome taught in conceal and carry classes?

TRUMP - POLICY ON RUSSIA AND ON ECONOMICS AS TWO NOTABLES DROP OUT: Russian expert Stephen Cohen on the new Cold War with Russia and the unexpected push for dialogue by Donald Trump. Trump speech at Detroit Economic Club to the inner city with a message of choice in schools and renewal of manufacturing work for inner cities. Here is a rich man, but not a Mitt Romney. The Donald Trump-Mike Pence team has been challenged as temperamentally unfit for the presidential office by Republicans who showed their own judgment of temperament by supporting the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket of 2008.

Republican feminist senator Susan Collins and Catholic neo-con Republican George Weigel have said they will not vote for Trump. Neither defection is a surprise.

An excellent cultural analysis from 'The Imaginative Conservative': Trump and manliness.
Joseph Pearce, Director of the Center for Faith and Culture and writer-in-residence at Aquinas College in Nashville, wrote a penetrating book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn after multiple face-to-face interviews with the great Russian author. Pearce brings considerably more historical and religious perspective to understanding Vladimir Putin than the hysterical anti-Russian crowd trying to refight the Cold War with the wrong enemy. His essay: Putin, Solzhenitsyn, and Perspective.