Lawrence A. Uzzell

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 »

Don't Call it Proselytismby Lawrence A. Uzzell Several years ago, during an interview I was conducting with him on church-state relations, an adviser to a provincial governor in Siberia asked me suspiciously if I believed in “proselitizm.” I replied that I not only believed in it but actually . . . . Continue Reading »

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 »

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 »

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 »

On June 24, 1997, the Vatican made a mistake in political judgment. Pope John Paul II sent a letter to Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia, that was intended to help block passage of new legislation restricting the rights of religious minorities but that, in the long run, helped insure that . . . . Continue Reading »