MANAMA, Bahrain — I had a meeting in Bahrain, not far from where I live, on March 2, 2011, at about the midpoint of a month of street demonstrations that began with euphoria over Egypt and Tunisia’s popular uprisings and…
TYRE — For $50 a family can take a safe, radio-call taxi from the congested heart of Beirut to the uncluttered ancient waterfront of Tyre, a few miles north of the border with Israel. Lush banana plantations line the coastal…
It is accepted wisdom that the newly beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and his associates in the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement were influences in the faith formation of members of the Episcopal Church in the United States, including some who…
PRAGUE — A week of flawless Indian summer weather diverts this bittersweet land of liberty from events and conditions auguring a long, anxious autumn. November will mark 20 years since the Velvet Revolution ended the Communist dictatorship, but the celebration…
ZACATECAS, Mexico — Imagine a merry combination of Thomas More and Peter Sellers, and you may get a sense of an extraordinary personality who came from this silver mining capital’s adjoining colonial town of Guadalupe and, during his brief career…
PUEBLA DE LOS ÁNGELES, Mexico — The authentic Cinco de Mayo, like Ireland’s Solemnity of St. Patrick, is quite different from the ersatz celebrations in the United States conjured by the beer barons and their marketing wizards, dousing Kowalskis, Smiths,…
MEXICO CITY — In the precincts of Coyoacán near to where Leon Trotsky caught the business end of an ice pick sprawls a monument to Big Government and the delirium of National Greatness if not to any certifiable species of…
MEXICO CITY, April 27, 2009 — On the crowded sidewalks of Paseo de la Reforma, a dark-eyed office worker held a cell phone to her left ear and with her free hand pulled down her blue medical mask to reveal…
MEXICO CITY — On his way to glad-hand Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad last weekend, President Barack Obama did a one-day drop-by in this capital. His meetings with President Felipe Calderón were…