Recently we were with my wife’s sister, Gina, when she took her last breath. She was surrounded by family and went painlessly.

            We immediately missed her smiles, her laughter, her stories of a convoluted life, from China to Malaysia and then America. She weathered two husbands and had an adoring family.

            Where did she go?

            I’ve been with four creatures at the moment of their deaths. Well, two were our dogs. But besides them, one was my wife’s mother, and then there was Gina.

            The mystery of death is compounded by being close to it. It elevates the question of what happens afterwards to an existential moment. But we all wonder about it much of the time, at the edges of our consciousness. How can we not, since it faces us all?

            The popular culture provides us with a cartoon version of heaven. There is an old bearded man in a white robe sitting on a cloud surrounded by other white-robed people looking terribly bored.

            Much fun is made about the requirements to get in. The typical cartoon has St Peter sitting at the entrance gate going through his book of approved invitees. One cartoon has an applicant fumbling through his cell phone muttering that he can’t find the right password.

            Another has a grateful lady gushing her appreciation, wondering whether it was her good works or her charitable contributions that got her in? St Peter checks his records and tells her, “no, it was on the recommendation of your cat.”

            We expect to be reunited with our pets that we liked, along with our relatives, whether we liked them or not. One cartoon has a long line waiting at St Peter’s door, and next to it is one marked “Pre-Check,” where dogs are joyously bounding through unhindered.

            All this is an elaboration on a Persian concept, pairidaēza, from which we get the word “paradise.” It literally means a walled garden and was the notion of an elegant afterlife in ancient Persia. It became refined in Zoroastrianism, were the two regions of hell and heaven were imagined. Your good deeds would get you upstairs to heaven, your bad ones down to the basement hell.

            Donald Trump has famously said that he wants to get into heaven. He also wants to receive a Nobel Prize. We’ll see if he has any luck with either.

            Early Christianity was conflicted about the Zoroastrian concepts of heaven and hell, even though they had gained popularity throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. This was during the time when Christianity was emerging from its cocoon as a small Jewish sect into a world religion spread widely by the Apostle Paul.

            Paul and other early Christians accepted the prevailing idea of ancient Israel, that the dead would lay dead until the Last Judgement. Then at the end of time the Messiah would return, the trumpet would sound and those who were deemed worthy to be saved would rise up “incorruptible,” meaning they would have perfect new bodies, and take their roles in a new reality.  

            The texts of the New Testament gospels, however, showed influences from the Persian and Greek influences of the Mediterranean world. The word translated into English as “heaven” appears 70 times in the Gospel of Matthew, for example. It talks about the “kingdom of heaven,” and praying to “Our Father, who art in heaven.”

            The Greek word that is translated as “heaven” is ουρανός (ouranos). It is the basis of the English word “aeronautical,” and is related to the Greek word aeros, from which we get the English word “air.”

            Ouranos, translated as “heaven,” originally meant air, but it also meant air-up-there, or sky, as in “the heavens.” It also meant air within, or breath.

            The notion of internal air, or breath, was deemed crucial to life, and therefore in many ancient traditions, including ancient Israel, it was the essence of life itself. In the first chapter of the biblical book of Genesis, the creation of the earth is described by the act of God bringing life into the planet by blowing his breath upon it (Genesis 1:2).

            Many versions of the bible translate the Hebrew word for breath, ruach, as “spirit.” Thus in these translations the second verse of Genesis reads, the “spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.”

            The idea of breath and spirit, were, in fact, intertwined. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is reported to have compared the idea of the Holy Spirit to wind. Like the Holy Spirit, the wind “blows where it wishes” (John 3:8).

            The Greek word for spirit that appears in the Bible is pneuma, which also means “air.” It is the source of the term “pneumatic,” as in air-filled tires, or “pneumonia,” a disease of our air organ, the lungs.

            Back to the idea of heaven. The fact that the Greek word in the Bible was linked with “air,” and thence to “spirit,” gives us a clue to its meaning. It could mean that it was up there in the sky, in the heavens.

            But it could also mean that it was a realm of pure spirit. This would mean that the early Christian notion of heaven was an alternative reality of spirit, as contrasted with the material world.

            There is one other term related to life after death that is frequently found in the New Testament: eternity. In the Gospel of John it is used more than seventeen times.

            The Greek word translated as eternity is “aionios.” It literally means “of an age.” The contexts in which it is used, however, suggest that it means “age after age,” or a timelessness without beginning and end. Hence the English word “eternity” to translate it.

            Put this concept together with the meaning of heaven as pure spirit, and you have the notion of a timeless realm of non-materiality. Eternal spirit.

            Interestingly, modern physics points in the same direction. I have been trying to understand quantum physics, though without much success. At one point in reading a wonderful book by the physicist Carlo Rovelli, I stumbled upon a sentence indicating that the idea of time was not fundamental to theories of quantum gravity. What? Time and space is all we humans know about the world around us. How can we conceive of a world without time?

According to many quantum theories, time could be an emergent phenomenon, arising from the entanglement of quantum objects. How we perceive space could also be emergent, not essential to basic untangled quanta.

            This suggests that from the quantum theoretical perspective the deepest reality is a timeless one. It is a timeless realm of non-materiality. That sounds to me like “eternal spirit.”

            I have always suspected that the reality that we perceive cannot possibly be the only dimensions of existence. It is why we grow-ups flounder when children ask, “where were we before we were born?” and “what is beyond the sky?”

That is why I enjoy the efforts of religious traditions throughout the ages to imagine alternative realities. I am similarly grateful to modern science for broadening our thinking about the nature of things beyond our human limitation of thinking only in the dimensions of time and space.

            Does this help us think about what will happen when we die? I don’t know about you, but it comforts me to know that there is a substratum of reality, a timeless realm, that has always been there and will always be there. It is that state that is at the essence of all things, including ourselves, now and after we die. Eternal spirit, we come to you.  

It seems that the whole world has celebrated the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas. And justly so. There is much to celebrate – after two bloody years of destruction in Gaza and the enduring captivity of the Israeli hostages the guns were silenced. The hostages—those still alive—came home. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners were released.

            How did it happen? And who should claim the credit?

            We know the answer to the second question, since US President Donald Trump was lauded in the Israeli Knesset and his face plastered on billboards in Tel Aviv. He has not been shy about claiming that he alone was the peacemaker in this historic moment.

            But something about that explanation doesn’t seem quite right. I’ve studied how conflict ends, especially those bitter encounters involving non-state religious terrorist movements. In my book, How God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends, I have taken a deep dive into the mindset of the militants in ISIS and other movements to understand how they saw the ending of their military encounters.

            It was not defeat on the battlefield. And it was not through the mediation of an outside party.

            Invariably the movements were weakened from within. Internal conflict and the erosion of confidence in leadership were critical. Equally important was the diminishing of support from the general population that had previously given militant movements legitimacy and cooperation.

            These factors may also have played a role in the cease fire agreement signed by Israel and Hamas. It is true, however, that outside mediators can play a role.

            Take the case of Northern Ireland. The so-called “Troubles” between the militant Northern Irish IRA and the Protestant Unionists in the region had lingered for decades of cruelty and terror with no end in sight. The Good Friday agreement in 1998 brought an end to the fighting.

            A key player in the negotiations was an outsider, U.S. Senator George Mitchell. He spent months on the ground, helping to craft the agreement and serving as a mediator between both sides. Though his role was valuable, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded not to Mitchell but to the leaders of the Catholic and Protestant sides who signed the accords.

            Recognizing Mitchell’s useful role in the Northern Ireland situation, President Barack Obama dispatched him to Israel to be a mediator in its conflict with their Palestinian territories. After some months, Mitchell gave up the task. They were not ready for peace, he lamented.

            So why was Hamas and the Israeli government ready for peace in October 2025? After all, the 22-point peace agreement that Trump forwarded was essentially the same as the one proposed during the previous administration of President Joe Biden.

            But a lot can happen in a year. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was increasingly hammered by an angry Israeli population weary of war and eager for the return of the last of the hostages. The longer the fighting continued the more likely that Israeli hostages would be killed in Israeli attacks along with thousands of Palestinians. Netanyahu was constrained, however, by extremists in his own cabinet who wanted all Palestinians to leave and allow for an expanded “biblical Israel.”

            Hamas leadership had been seriously degraded by Israeli military actions. Moreover, the movement’s closest allies—Hizbollah, Houthis, and Iran—had all been crippled by Israeli attacks. Within Gaza opposition to Hamas was building, united around several old Palestinian families who provided bases of resistance to the movement.

            Hence the pattern that I had observed in the ending of ISIS and other militant conflicts was replicated in the case of Hamas and Israel. But each needed a reason to placate the extremists in their ranks and urge them into a cease fire agreement.

            That’s where Trump stepped in. Though there was nothing new about the terms of the agreement, each side could point to his insistence as the factor that necessitated a now-or-never deal. He helped to create the impression that this would be the best that could get out of a difficult situation, and if they did not seize the opportunity, it would be grinding conflict with no end in sight.

            The time had come. The momentum for closure was building. Internal squabbling on both Hamas and Israeli government sides had increased, their popular support had significantly eroded, and neither side had much to gain by protracted struggle. And they had Trump to use as an argument to persuade the extremists in their own camps.

If Trump secretly held out large sums of money to help Gaza rebuild and Israel to maintain its military strength, that would have been further incentive. After all, with all Trump’s cut-backs in government operations and services and huge new consumer taxes brought about by tariffs, he had plenty of money to throw around. He gave 20 billion to an Argentinian autocrat to prop up his failing economy just because he liked him. He could certainly spare that for Gaza.

Whether the cease fire is a temporary thing or will lead to lasting peace is an open question. Hamas has regained strength and is executing Gaza residents who collaborated with the Israeli enemy. Now that the hostages have returned, Netanyahu can return to Gaza with a militant vengeance if he desires.

For a time, however, the world celebrates the silencing of guns and bombs. However it came about, it is welcomed. And in the best of scenarios, it could be a time for new beginnings.     

I was recently invited to be on the podcast hosted by Brad Carr to discuss my book, Why God Needs War and War Needs God. It was an opportunity to talk about how the alternative realities of war and religion reinforce each other. And how in some extremists movements we see the merger of the two in apocalyptic visions where religion is war and war is religion. It’s scary stuff.

            One of Biden’s great achievements during his term as President was the solidification of a transnational world order focusing on a confluence of Western nations with the US as its patron. The war in the Ukraine provided an occasion for this remarkable alliance. No other global entity at the time had quite the same global supremacy.

            Trump changed all that. And in the process he created a similar, though opposing distinction. Not only did he dismantle the global order that Biden helped to maintain, he almost single-handedly created a new one. Unfortunately, however, the US was not in it

            . Quite the opposite. What Trump inadvertently helped to create was a transnational alliance of countries. These were the ones—and they were many—that felt abandoned and punished by Trump’s America-first foreign policy and his wildly reckless tariffs.

            This new alliance is arguably the most potent constellation of nations today, eclipsing the European-American partnership. The world order has shifted eastward to Asia. China is at its center.

            The summit meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2025 crystallized the formation of this new world order. In attendance were representatives—many of them heads of state—of twenty-five countries. They included several that are pariah states from the Western perspective, including Russia, Iran, Belarus, Myanmar, and even North Korea. Kim Jung Un showed up by train on the last day of the summit to view the huge parade.

            Among the countries at the summit, however, were several that America has regarded as friends, including Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Egypt. It even included one NATO country, Turkey.

            What was happening?

            The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has been around for a while. It was formed in 2001 to succeed the Shanghai Five alliance between China and Russia, along with three former-Soviet Central Asian states. Since then it has gradually expanded, though nothing on the colossal scale of the 2025 meetings. Despite the name “Shanghai” in its title, the 2025 SCO summit was held at the Tianjin seaport near Beijing.

            A common refrain in the speeches of Xi and other leaders at the summit was the need for a new global alliance that would reject narrow nationalist isolationism and crippling tariffs that disrupt international trade. They were talking about Trump, of course. So you can say that this was a glorious convocation called to stick it to America.

            But the meetings were more than just Trump-bashing, though there was plenty of that. Although the main events were at the end of August into early September, meetings targeting specific issues began in June. They included forums on business and the digital economy, a council of foreign ministers, an international television festival, an international dialogue on civilization, a media and think tank summit, and a council of ministers of agriculture that focused on rural development, poverty reduction, and technological exchange.

            At the same time that the formal events were taking place, there were many back door and hallway interactions. Putin and Xi chatted frequently, of course. Prime Minister Narendra Modi from India was there to cozy up to Xi, who declared a new chapter in India-China relations. He was smoothing over the recent border clashes between the two countries regarding disputed territory. Perhaps a more permanent cease fire is in the works.

            The SCO was building the framework for an enduring structure of global cooperation. China was the logical locus for the convocation. But it was also the appropriate leader of it. Unlike the recent posture of the US, it was the remaining global superpower willing to invest in global trade and development, both financially and politically, and not just retreat into its own shell. In the process, however, China will reap enormous benefits from these connections that will likely endure for decades.

            The world is shifting. The year 2025 and the SCO summit may go down in history as the axial moment when America’s leadership in the global order was replaced by China. It remains to be seen whether the world will be better off as a result.

            As an American, watching the so-called press conference after the Alaska summit between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the American President Donald Trump regarding ending the war in Ukraine was a complete embarrassment. It was a so-called press conference since there were no questions allowed; instead it was sort of a double monologues with a long happy speech by Putin and a very brief sour statement by Trump.

            Trump had raised high expectations. Though he was unable to end the war in Ukraine “on day one,” as he frequently promised during his presidential campaign, maybe now he could achieve something. Maybe at least a cease fire. And with it, the possibility of receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. It was the one achievement of Barack Obama that has thus far eluded Trump. He desperately wants it.

             The physical setting at a US air base near Anchorage had all the right graphics. The logo, Pursuing Peace, was on the backdrop of the stage where the post-summit speeches were held. Putin had been treated royally by Trump. A literal red-carpet had been rolled out to greet him when he arrived. Then Putin joined Trump in the presidential limousine for a drive to the meetings.

            This was quite a welcome for someone who is declared a war criminal by the International Criminal Court and would be arrested in Europe by any nation that is a party to the ICC agreement, which conveniently the US has not signed. But in Trump’s eyes, Putin was Putin, the larger-than-life figure that he has long admired. He was hoping to woo him by nice words and glamorous settings, precisely the kind of things that attract Trump himself.

            For many hours they talked. And they talked. And talked. At the end, Putin gave a syrupy announcement saying how much he yearned for peace, and how wonderful Trump was, and the only minor thing to assure a solution was to remove those matters that had created the conflict in the first place.

            Huh? The conflict was created by Putin invading Ukraine and trying to absorb it into Russia, everyone knows that. The simple solution is for Russia to stop trying to do that. Putin could call an end to the so-far unsuccessful attempt at accession and withdraw what is left of his badly damaged army.

            But that, alas, is not how Putin sees the situation. He has claimed repeatedly that Ukraine is a fiction. The country is not really a country but a region of Russia. So in Putin’s mind, to remove the conditions that caused Russia to invade in the first place would be for Ukraine and its allies, including the US, to acknowledge Russia’s ownership of the country. They should simply back away and let Putin win.

            So much for diplomacy. Putin essentially said the same thing that he has said from the beginning of the conflict. No change. No compromise. No cease fire.

            He made a fool out of Trump.

            Trump’s brief remarks after Putin’s long triumphant oration was basically to say that the deal isn’t done. Clearly it never would be, from Puttin’s point of view. And then Trump said it was now up to Zelensky to solve the matter, as if the country that was invaded could somehow persuade the invading country to back off. The only way it could do that is with a massive show of force, which is what the US has been trying to do before the reign of Donald Trump.

            What will happen now? Will this exercise in public humiliation have an effect on Trump and cause him to change course?

            Trump is terribly thin-skinned and hates to be made a fool. This is one of the reasons why he despises Obama, since Barack made jokes at his expense at a Washington Press Corps dinner many years ago. Trump has still not forgotten it.

             If Trump gets it—if he realizes he’s been made a fool, and is sufficiently angered, maybe he’ll change course. Maybe he’ll begin to support Ukraine more strongly militarily, and work with European allies to put pressure on Russia. He could raise the sanctions and try to put an economic stranglehold on Russia.

            Maybe. If he realizes he’s been made a fool.

            The initial appearance on Fox News was the opposite. Trump tried to turn defeat into victory, the way he often does. He declared that the summit achieved all of his objectives, 10 out of 10.

            We’ll see. Maybe he’ll wake up the next day and read the headlines in the New York Times and realize he’s been had. Big time. And then he might want to lash back at Putin.

            In that case, curiously, the summit might indeed turn out to be something of a success.

A podcast discussion on religion and politics in the Middle East with me and my colleague John Esposito. It was a good discussion, I think. We agreed that there is a sense of ummah, a family of the faithful that is a wonderful thing, but it is also a dysfunctional family (as many are) with deep divisions and hatreds, the most vitriolic today being the Shia-Sunni split.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_eaVX1-4AQ

This has been a busy news week, and as one sometimes does, I turned to the Fox News website to see how they were handling it. My usual fare is the New York Times, the Atlantic, BBC, NPR, CNN, and so forth. They all say pretty much the same thing. But what do Fox viewers know about all this?

            Actually, nothing, as it turns out.

Take today for instance. The headlines on all of the major news outlets were about the bombshell report that the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, had warned President Trump in May that his name was often mentioned in the Epstein files. Since the entire corpus of the files are held in her office, there is no doubt that she let him know what it said about him, his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, and in what activities he might have been involved. She has the power to release those files to the public—just as she did days ago with the Martin Luther King, Jr. files. But she hasn’t. And she knew that Trump was mentioned.

            The leak from the Attorney General’s office was the big news, but the major news outlets also reported on the court’s rejection of Trump’s request for the relatively unimportant Grand Jury files on Epstein to be released. And there were items on the near starvation situation in Gaza and Columbia University’s $200 million dollar settlement (more like a bribe than a settlement) to get its millions of dollars of research money released. I expected that Fox would put an interesting spin on all of this, but what I found surprised me even more.

            Nothing.

            There was nothing on the Epstein case, nothing on the court’s rejection of Trump’s request, nothing on Gaza or the Columbia University settlement. There was only the sound of crickets.

            But there were news items that grabbed the Fox News headlines. Surely in the NY Times you read about the amazing subpoenas that have been recommended to be sent to both Hilary and Bill Clinton by a House committee investigating the Epstein matter, didn’t you? No? Hmm, neither did I.

            The biggest Fox News headline—a banner across the page in vibrant red—stated that “Tulsi Gabbard Gives Major Update on DOJ’s Role in Investigating Trump-Russia Collusion ‘Hoax.’” Amazing news, I suppose. Though I didn’t see a single word about that in any other news outlet, and I looked at quite a few.

            Then there were many other front page items that I had never heard of. A comedian slammed “terrorist supporter” NYC mayoral candidate (we know who that was), and an attack by Joy Behar on the television show “The View” prompted Trump to tweet a warning about the show’s future.  And there were many items that you find at the bottom of newspaper pages, usually as filler for empty columns – a missing co-ed in Wisconsin, a Black actor on Broadway making a racist remark.

            This follows a pattern that I have noticed in my other occasional checkups on the Fox News page. There is just very little, well, news. It is no surprise that a Pew research poll showed that Fox News viewers were less well informed about the world than people who did not watch or read any news at all. You can actually know more about what’s going on the world by listening to people talk in the elevator than by watching Fox News and thinking you have information.

            The worst part about it is that the TV channel presents itself as a news source. It has all the cyber technology and glossy graphics to give the illusion that it is presenting news. It’s not.

            Many of us who view the horrors of what this administration has committed during its short tenure would like to think that once everyone knows about it, they will wise up and seek for change. That might be true, if those millions of viewers who rely solely on Fox News for their information actually find out about it. Maybe they will hear something in the elevator?

Let’s say that Israel or the US achieves a knockout blow and eliminates the Ayatollah of Iran. What happens next?

            Let’s look at the experience of neighboring countries that have recently gone through political disruptions and regime change. What are the options?

The Iraq scenario

            After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the George W. Bush administration expected that the country would immediately come together around a new democratically elected leader. After all Iraq appeared to be well-educated and hungry for an end of dictatorship. The neo-con leaders did not even do much planning for the reconstruction of the country. After toppling the dictator, it was “mission accomplished.”

            That’s not what happened, of course. The country was plunged into chaos and much of the population resented the occupying force of the US military presence as much or more than the dictatorial oppression of Saddam. Years of confusion and anti-American violence ensued.

Eventually the political forces organized around ethnicity and religion, the two enduring forms of identity and mobilization. Shi’a political parties dominated 60% of the country. Kurds in the north created their own independent region. Sunnis in the northwest mounted resistance movements against both the US and Shi’a rulers that eventually devolved into ISIS.

The Afghan scenario

            On the other side of Iran, Afghanistan was going through similar turmoil. The US military easily toppled the Taliban authority largely because its power rested on a coalition of regional ethnic forces. They abandoned the Taliban when it was apparent that they didn’t stand a chance against the American military might.

            This put the US in the uneasy position of being the occupying power. It was effective control mainly in the city of Kabul with skirmishes against growing regrouped Taliban militia around the country. Eventually when the US left in a deal worked out by the Trump administration, the Taliban marched back in.

The Syrian scenario

            Iran’s main ally in the region, Syria, was controlled by the Asad family and their supporters from the Alawite sect, which is related to Shi’a Islam. The Shi’a connection to Iran was a tight bond that helped to sustain Iran’s influence over the region, along with Lebanon’s Hizbollah party and Yemen’s Houthis.

            But Hizbollah and the Houthis have been militarily degraded in recent attacks from Israel and the US. The Asad regime also fell, toppled by an organized Sunni militia that quickly maintained control over the country and became the ruling party.

            This was the smoothest transition of any of the recent regime changes in the neighboring countries. It was successful largely because there already was an organized militia and a ruling party in a northern province of Syria. It was able to provide security and administration for the country as a whole.

The Yemen scenario

            Civil war broke out after the fall of the Saleh regime in Yemen. A militia based in the Houthi ethnic community of northern Yemen rose up against the government and took control of the major city, Saana. The Houthis were followers of a kind of Shi’a sect, which made them natural allies of Iran. The government forces in the south were supported by Saudi Arabia, and the continuing conflict was largely seen as a proxy war between the Saudis and Iran.  

The Somalia scenario

            After the overthrow of the regime of President Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia plunged into political chaos. Unlike Yemen there were no strong internal powers to define the situation as civil war between two contesting parties. Instead a variety of subgroups and warlords rose up exerting power in various parts of the country. They operated more like competing gangs than like credible alternative governments.

            What Somalia did not have was the occupying power of a foreign country – the US in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan – to provide stability until it found an alternative form of control and political leadership. In the case of Iraq it was a fractured control and leadership, but at least it was not sheer chaos. In Afghanistan it was a return to the old Taliban. As wretched as its rule was for many modern educated people in urban areas it was a stable rule for which much of the rural parts of the country was familiar.

            But Somalia did not have an occupying power to provide civil order. It also did not have a well defined militia and political party sufficiently powerful to replace the national leadership and provide stability. What emerged in Somalia was chaos and a failed state.      

Iran after the Ayatollah

            Will Iran after the Ayatollah follow one of these scenarios? Or will it follow a different course? The government is well established and the likelihood is that if the current Ayatollah is dispatched, another will soon be chosen to take his place. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran requires the office of a Supreme Leader in addition to the usual three branches of a democratic state—judicial, executive, and parliamentary. So a new leader would have to be chosen, and perhaps life will go on without a hitch.

            On the other hand, the political turmoil of international conflict linked with major physical assaults on the country leading up to the killing of the Supreme Leader could spark an uprising throughout the country. Iran has experience widescale rebellion before, though this time it could be catastrophic for the regime. It could fall.

            If that happens, one of the options that has befallen the other countries in its neighborhood could be Iran’s fate as well. Perhaps the most likely is a combination of the Yemen and Somalia scenarios.

            There are well-defined ethnic communities within Iran that could break away and form their own semi-independent states. Only 60% of the country is ethnically Persian. There is a large Baluchi community in the southeast that could break away and form ties with the Baluchis across the border in Pakistan.

            On the western side of Iran there is a huge Kurdish population adjacent to Iraq’s Kurdistan. When I was in Sulaymaniyah, an Iraqi Kurdish city on the border with Iran, I was impressed on how easily people went back and forth across the border as if it was one region. South of Iran’s Kurdish region is a Kurdish related community, the Lurs. Another community in the far northeast are the Azeris, a Turkish-speaking group related to Azerbaijan.

            Each of these could spin off into its own semi-autonomous region. The Persian heartland might be thrown into a Somalia-like confusion with different gangs and warlords competing for power. Years of turmoil would follow.

            What might keep this from happening would be the intervention of a foreign power to provide stability. After all, Iran is one of the world’s great oil producers, and the world economy depends on the continued access of this precious resource.

            Russia might want to intercede, or China. To keep that from happening, Israel or more likely, the United States would bring in its own troops. Is the United States ready for another unending war of occupation in the Middle East?  

Tucked among the many horrible things that the current federal budget bill – the one Trump calls the “Big Beautiful Bill” – is a little noticed but profoundly impactful item. It terminates federal funding for university’s area studies centers and foreign language fellowships.

            For me this is personal. Much of my own career has been linked to these programs. My graduate school studies were funded by them and they were the life blood for academic units I’ve administered in my career.

            But it is not just me. Whole generations of area studies scholars have relied on this funding. It is perhaps the most important source of money for academic programs that train students in the diversity of the world’s cultures and languages. It trains not only scholars but also budding business leaders and diplomats, and is arguably one of the most effective ways in which the U.S. has maintained its global ties and international prominence.

            The collapse of this support is breathtaking.

            Area studies funding began during the Cold War when the government awoke to the importance of other cultures around the world. I suppose the thinking the time was that we needed information about these places since we might bomb them, or maybe we wanted to seek their support. Either way we needed to know more about them.

            Students eagerly accepted the funds as prerequisites to seeking global careers. Scholars and college administrators sought the funds to support the study of cultures and languages that otherwise might go by the wayside. Often classes in Hindi, Japanese, or Tagalog would be small and expensive, unable to exist without the federal money.

            For decades, universities throughout the country have relied on funding for Area studies centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships supported through Title VI of the National Higher Education Act. In 1958 at the beginning of the Cold War the funding was established through the National Defense Education Act. It was transferred from the Defense Department to the Department of Education in 1965.

            One of these foreign language grants saved my graduate career. After my first year in graduate school at Berkeley in the 1960s, I had wasted much of my time in anti-Vietnam War protest marches and rallies, and had a strew of incompletes in my political science seminars. I was about to leave grad school and go to Vietnam as a stringer to report on the war when someone stole my motorcycle. It was my only source of funds. I had no money to go anywhere, much less Vietnam.

            My graduate school advisor at the time, Warren Ilchman, persuaded me to at least finish my MA thesis. I hurriedly completed it. Then as I was trying to figure out what I would do next, he called me with exciting news. My thesis received honors, and entitled me to receive a US-funded Foreign Language Grant. For the next three years I dutifully studied Hindi as if it was my job at McDonalds, since it was the only source of funding I had to complete my PhD.

            When I finished my degree I was desperately looking for a job, with no success. Again my thesis advisor came up with a solution, and again it involved federal area studies funding. Ilchman was chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at Berkeley, and he would appoint me to be its Project Director.

            I was elated at the title of my new position until I discovered that there was no money for my salary. Instead, as Project Director, I would have to write grants and raise money for the Center’s projects, and they would provide my salary out of administrative overhead. Much of these funds came from Title VI Area Studies support.

            I stayed at Berkeley for fifteen years, continuing to get grants as I maintained a half-time teaching position as Coordinator of the university’s religious studies program. When I left in 1989 it was to be dean of a new School of Hawai’ian, Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawai’i. The new School simply put together a cluster of a dozen or so area studies centers ranging from Chinese and Japanese to Korean, Filipino and Pacific Islands Studies, and a graduate program in Asian studies. My job was to help coordinate these and to keep them funded. The financial support came not only from the state of Hawaii but more importantly from federal area studies grants. Many of the students in our Asia studies graduate program relied on the foreign language studies fellowships, as I had in my own graduate school training.

            Needless to say, today my colleagues at Berkeley, Hawaii and at area studies centers across the world are devastated. What will become of their academic programs?

            My guess is that many will fold. Others will lumber on with local university and state support. But they will be a shell of their former selves. And America’s place in the world will have been diminished as a result.

A new paperback edition of God at War with a new Preface, just out. Oxford University Press is selling it for just 20 bucks. Or you can listen to the audio version of God at War. This is the Preface for the new edition:

When the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a staunch ally of Vladimir Putin, Patriarch Kiril, proclaimed in his Easter Sunday sermon on March 5, 2022 that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not just an ordinary conflict but one with “metaphysical significance,” he was saying something fundamental about the role of religion in war. God was not just on Russia’s side. The war itself was of transcendent proportions.

            A similar notion appears to have been in the mind of Yahyah Sinwar, the leader of Hamas who gave the order for the attack on Israel on October 6, 2023. Sinwar is said to have compared himself with Saladin, the great warrior in Islamic history who liberated Jerusalem from Crusaders in 1187 CE, thereby placing himself in the pantheon of heroes in Islamic history.

            A religious mission is also in the thinking of some right-wing members of Israel’s cabinet as they pursue the war against Hamas in Gaza. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security and leader of the Jewish Power Party, subscribes to the idea of Eretz Israel, the God-given right of Israel to all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. He has encouraged Palestinians fleeing the conflict to permanently leave Gaza and allow Jewish settlements to return.     

            In both the Ukraine and Gaza wars, religion has played a role, as it has in many other conflict situations around the world. But what kind of role? We know that often religious figures are brought in to bless soldiers before battle and that religious literature is full of images of warfare. It is clear that in these ways war needs God and religion needs war. But there is also a third option, when the idea of God and the idea of warfare are intertwined in one apocalyptic notion of cosmic war.

            It is these ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and war that will be explored in this book. It will attempt to make sense of this dark relationship between violence and divinity and probe into the essential nature of both that makes them compatible with one another. What is it about the very essence of the idea of war that cries out for religious verification, and what is it about the character of the religious imagination that war is so easily assimilated into its world views?

            My thinking about this has been seasoned over many years of studying religious-related violence in the rise of militant movements globally in virtually ever major religious tradition. I have drawn upon my field work and conversations with activists in Iraq, Israel, Egypt, India, Japan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Philippines, the United States and elsewhere to understand the phenomena of religion and violence from the perspective of militants engaged in lethal struggles.

            I sometimes speak of these phenomena as incidents of religious violence, but I do not mean by that that religion causes violence, any more than the phrase “religious art” or “religious music” means that religion causes art or music. Rather, I mean that religion is related to these things in some way. Just how they are related is what I want to explore.            

In writing this book I was engaged in a five-year series of case studies of three militant religious-related movements—ISIS in Iraq, the Khalistan movement in India’s Punjab, and the Moro movement in the Mindanao state of the Philippines. Having studied the rise of violent religious movements over many years I wanted to know how they ended. This meant understanding how they detached the religious images of transcendent warfare from the earthly struggles that could more easily be mitigated. Hence my renewed interest in what war was, and what religion had to do with it.