We may all be secularists now, but what kind? Today's debates over the public role of "faith-based" organizations and other church-state issues show that one idea of what it means to be a secular society is giving way to another.
Throw out the old clichés about India. It´s a growing power that the United States can no longer afford to ignore.
Shakespeare's Tempest is just one place Cubans are looking as they try to imagine the post-Fidel future.
No anniversary of Hiroshima passes without reminding the world of the vast power revealed by the deceptively simple formula E=mc2. But Albert Einstein’s famous equation had another career, illuminating, among other things, the origins of the universe and its likely end. In one important chapter of that career a young scientist named Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–79) played the leading role.
The rise of a new black middle class has lifted hopes that African Americans are entering the economic mainstream. But an alarming obstacle has appeared: Many children of this new middle class significantly lag their white peers in important measures of school performance. The gap threatens the goal of quickly achieving racial equality—and the logic of the American experience itself, with its promise of upward mobility and social inclusion. Here, an African American educator offers his view of what’s gone wrong.
Summaries of recent papers, studies, and meetings at the Wilson Center
"America’s Forgotten Majority" by Joel Rogers and Ruy Teixeira, in The Atlantic Monthly (June 2000), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114.
"What Is Still Living in ‘Consensus’ History and Pluralist Social Theory" by Leo P. Ribuffo, in American Studies International (Feb. 2000), George Washington Univ., Washington, D.C. 20052; "The Perils of Particularism: Political History after Hartz" by John Gerring, in Journal of Policy History (1999: No. 3), St. Louis Univ., 3800 Lindell Blvd., P.O. Box 56907, St. Louis, Mo. 63156-0907.
"Lockbox Government" by Alasdair Roberts, in Government Executive (May 2000), 1501 M St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.