May 17, 2003

The air is thick with politics. Reportedly some 60 different political groups have emerged here since the end of the war. Driving around Baghdad, one suddenly comes upon a building surrounded by men with guns. Groups are staking their postwar claims to the real estate. In one case, the soldiers turned out to be members of a Kurdish party. The Shi‘ite Muslims have been among the quickest to grab a share of the territory.

"Before I became enlightened, mountains were mountains and trees were trees.” So begins a well-known Zen Buddhist proverb that continues: “As I approached enlightenment, mountains appeared to be more than mountains and trees more than trees. Now I am enlightened; mountains are mountains and trees are trees.”

Leaving aside the question of whether I have grown more or less enlightened over time, I seem to have progressed along a similar path in my reading of the Gospels. My current understanding of a given passage can be uncannily like that of my first encounter with it.

The truck next to me at the stoplight had these words pasted across the back window: “I Have a Son in the Army.” There was no flag decal, no “I’m proud to have” in front of the words, just the fact. I imagined that this son was in Iraq, and that this father was thinking about him as he waited for the light to change.

Jean Bethke Elshtain began her career by challenging traditional gender roles—the assumption that the public realm is primary and belongs to men, and that the private realm is secondary and belongs to women. Characteristically, she applied her analysis in unpredictable ways, as indicated by the title of one of her early books, Women and War. The place of women in the conduct of war was not a typical feminist concern. Further complicating her feminist vision was Elshtain’s fierce defense of women’s work in the domestic sphere.

"People will be inclined to give their children those skills and traits that align with their own temperaments and lifestyles,” writes Gregory Stock, an apostle of human genetic engineering who heads the program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA. “A devout individual may want his child to be even more religious and resistant to temptation.”

With The Shape of Things, filmmaker Neil LaBute returns to his earlier status as a "nasty piece of work." After taking a moral hiatus to direct the uneven black comedy Nurse Betty (2000) and the dreary love story Possession (2002), he is back to the severe old tricks he exhibited in his first two films, the upsetting but challenging In the Company of Men (1997) and the less successful Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), where he exposed the underbelly of men's emotions and insecurities, especially in the ongoing and always escalating battle of the