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Muffling the Clash

From the February 2005 Print Edition

The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations in Not Inevitable by Michael Novak Basic. 281 pp. $26. Political freedom remains alien to most of the world’s Muslims, in both theory and practice. It would be good for that to change, because political freedom is a universal . . . . Continue Reading »

Russia: Religion on a Leash

From the May 2004 Print Edition

To those who value stability above all other political goods, Russia should look more attractive now than at any time since the early 1980s. That is especially true for church-state relations. Religious liberty, after shrinking since the mid-1990s, now seems to have reached an equilibrium. A year . . . . Continue Reading »

Remembering the Gulag

From the November 2003 Print Edition

Gulag: A History . By Anne Applebaum. Doubleday. 720 pp. $35 . Somewhere a young film student is reading Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History , a magisterial survey of the Soviet labor-camp system, and someday he will do what nobody else has succeeded in doing”not even Aleksandr . . . . Continue Reading »

Letter from Moscow

From the May 1999 Print Edition

Visitors from the West are often surprised to learn how many historic Catholic churches are scattered about the Russian heartland. Today’s ultra-nationalists cultivate the myth of a purely Russian-speaking, purely Orthodox czarist Russia with Catholics only in far-western possessions like Poland . . . . Continue Reading »