StocktonAfterClass

Send us Fan Mail This is a difficult topic.  In my classes I had quite a few Lebanese students, mostly Shia but some Maronite Catholics, and a few Sunni.  Many were from refugee families.  Many were refugees themselves.  Over the years they told me stories of their families and of those terrible days.  Even now I get angry at leaders who seem driven with delusions of changing the world and seem in...

Send us Fan Mail Back in 2003 Jane and I were in Berlin visiting our friend Sibylle Laurischk.  Sibylle was a member of the Bundestag, the German parliament.  She was with the Free Democrats, the fourth largest party.  I had just completed a major project on Arab-Americans (the Detroit Arab-American Study) and offered to discuss the findings with any members of her party who were interested.  She...

Send us Fan Mail On August 12, 2022 there was an attempted assassination of the world-class author Salman Rushdie.  Rushdie had twice won the Booker Prize for the best novel in the English language.  Then in 1978 he wrote a book entitled The Satanic Verses.  Part of the book focused upon a dream of a delusional man about a "city in the sand' where a group of false believers had embraced...

Send us Fan Mail A few years ago Jane and I were in Hannibal, the home town of Mark Twain.  We did all the touristy stuff -- the Becky Thatcher house, the Tom Sawyer cave.  We also went into a book store where I saw the autobiography of Mark Twain.  This was not a typical autobiography.  He tried that and stopped.  Then he decided to invent a new form of autobiography.  He would just write individ...

Send us Fan Mail I am an academic, not an activist.  Maybe I should be an activist, but I am not. In recent months (this is July 2022) the word apartheid has become almost universally used by those who are critical of Israeli occupation policies. This podcast  is a discussion of the comparisons between South African Apartheid, which ended in the early 1990s after the release of Nelson Mandela from...

Send us Fan Mail  This is a class lecture delivered near the end of the semester.  We had spent three months discussing different religious traditions from a political perspective.  As I told students, political scientists know nothing about God or about miracles.  We deal with people and politics.  I also told students on the first day, and repeated it more than once, that they were not required...

Send us Fan Mail This is a discussion of the gravestones of three really interesting people buried in the Detroit area.  One was a nationally famous radio preacher, one was a survivor of the Titanic, a woman from Tibnin, Lebanon, and one was an erased aunt whose existence was discovered posthumously by her nephew (who did not know she existed and who wrote an award-winning book Annie's Ghost...

Send us Fan Mail This was a class lecture on the most famous voting behavior study ever done, showing how certain variables connect to other variables to product voting outcomes.  This is not as boring as it sounds.  In fact, it is pretty interesting and will give you lots of insights.    Plus it is not very long. 

Send us Fan Mail Just two hours ago, I decided to do a podcast on Memorial Day.  As someone who grew up with strong patriotic impulses, it has been a surprise to me how my perspectives have changed.  Today, I think my country is in very bad shape.  There is an incredible danger from extremist elements who think it will be necessary to have a violent insurrection, even a Civil War, to overthrow the...

Send us Fan Mail Public Opinion did not emerge Full-Blown from some father's head (to borrow from Greek mythology).  In fact, the very concept of public opinion evolved over time.  This is the first of a two-part introduction to  the concept  of public opinion  focusing on how early scholars saw it.  The second lecture (these were delivered in class) will show how empirical public opinion res...

Send us Fan Mail On May 2, 2022, the draft  In 1973 the Supreme Court handed down its stunning decision, Roe v Wade, decriminalizing abortion and declaring that women had a constitutional right to privacy in their health decisions.   After 49 years, almost every child-bearing age female has grown up under this ruling.  But the Republican Party has spent 49 years committed to overturning it.  Today...

Send us Fan Mail This is a multi-part lecture I delivered to students in my class on Religion and Politics.  This focuses on the context within which Islam emerged.  There is an earlier talk on the Satanic Verses if you are interested.  As I would always do, I asked students for reactions to these lectures Here is what they said.  Many of you were very surprised to learn about the story of revelat...

Send us Fan Mail This is part I of a two part talk.  Part I deals with the political background to Liberation Theology, especially the role of US involvement in Central America as a radicalizing force.  Part II deals with stories about people, particularly Archbishop Romero, who was assassinated during mass, and Che Guevara, and how they were transformed by circumstances from moderates to radicals...

Send us Fan Mail We often assume that radicalism emerges from radical texts.  Someone reads the text and becomes a radical.  But sometimes it grows from experience and the fact that a efforts at moderate reform are blocked by resistant forces.  

Send us Fan Mail Orville Hubbard:  His Life and Career This is based on a zoom talk I did with Community Conversations, a social activist group associated with Littlefield Presbyterian Church of Dearborn, Michigan in May of 2021.  It is a broad discussion of the life and career of Orville Hubbard, for 36 years the creative but extremely controversial mayor of Dearborn.  I think Hubbard was one of...

Send us Fan Mail Populorum Progressio, Pope Paul VI, 1967 This was a class lecture, delivered in late 2020.  (Sorry for the occasional distractions)  It focuses upon one of the most significant of the papal encyclicals, one that engaged the concept of liberation theology.  Paul VI considered himself a Third World Pope, someone whose responsibilities stretched far beyond the Catholic world.   This...

Send us Fan Mail Back in 2019 I was asked by the Jewish News of Detroit to write some thoughts on whether Anti-Zionism was a form of Anti-Semitism.  President Macron of France had said that it was.  This was an allegation often used to attack and possibly discredit critics of Israel.   But what do those terms even mean?  My approach as a professor is to make sure there are clear definitions of con...

Send us Fan Mail This was a class lecture.  It discusses Father Gustavo Gutierrez and the concept of liberation theology.  Most theology comes down from above, from theologians, from universities, from popes.  Liberation Theology grows from the bottom up.    The structure of society is essential to understanding this way of thinking.  Injustice, inequality, historic structures dating back to colon...

Send us Fan Mail Background to the Ukraine War of 2022 Back in 2008 there was a crisis in Ukraine.  It led to the separation of two regions from Ukraine, and the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula.  I convened a Faculty Forum on the event, asking my knowledgeable colleagues to help us understand the issues.  I delivered some thoughts of my own on the American role and the American interes...

Send us Fan Mail Liberation Theology was strong in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s.  It was mostly Catholic, and was concentrated in Latin America, but there were variants of it in South Africa and in the  American Black Community, especially in the Detroit area.  James C. Cone is a name that stands out.  Those interested in an excellent discussion might look at Faith in the City by Angela D. Dillar...

Send us Fan Mail This is for lovers, for aspiring lovers, and for those who (to quote an old song) gambled for love in the moonlight,  but lost.  And if you want a longer love story, check out When Ron Met Jane, an earlier podcast.  

Send us Fan Mail On February 1, 2022 Whoopi Goldberg got a two week suspension from The View , the early morning women’s talk show that she hosts.  It occurred because of things she said about the Holocaust, race, and Jews as a category.  This is a really complex issue.  Anything in America involving “race” gets hot very quickly.  We can’t even agree upon what the word “race” means.  And when we m...

Send us Fan Mail On February 6,2021 I posted my first podcast.  As of the morning of February 6, 2022) I have 26,001 downloads in 106 countries and 1,982 different locations around the country and around the world .  This is a short report on what has happened over the last year. I discuss the origin of the podcast, what I hoped to achieve, where the listeners live, the types of topics covered in...

Send us Fan Mail F. W. DeKlerk, the last White President of South Africa.  The Logic of Apartheid, and how De Klerk’s perspective evolved  F. W. De Klerk died in November of 2021.  He came out of the very heart of the Afrikaaner establishment, and was firmly entrenched in the secret society known as the Broederbund (brotherhood).   Whites were about 15% of the South African population and the Afri...

Send us Fan Mail John Paul II John Paul II was one of the great popes.  He is now a saint.  As a saint, that means he has  intercessory power.  Individuals can pray to him and  he will take their concerns directly to God.  Someone becomes a saint by performing three miracles.  We will discuss what those miracles were, at least one of them.   John Paul became pope during a time of significant stres...