Background Briefing: December 25, 2025
A Former Catholic Priest on the Meaning of Christmas
On this Christmas Day we speak with James Carroll, the author of many books about religion, politics, and history. His memoir of the Vietnam War, An American Requiem, won the National Book Award. His history of the Pentagon, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, won the PEN-Galbraith Award, and his history of Christian antisemitism, Constantine’s Sword: The Church & The Jews, won the National Jewish Book Award. He published a weekly oped column in the Boston Globe for 23 years, and most recently his essay about Gaza, Secret Sharers: Jews, Muslims, and This Long, Cruel War, appeared in The American Prospect. A former Catholic priest, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and we discuss the meaning of Christmas in spite of Vance saying “By the grace of God we will always be a Christian nation” and the heresy of the Prosperity Gospel.
Continuing the Retrospective From the Archives With an Interview on Israel as the New Hegemon From April of 2025
Then we continue our retrospective of 2025 from the Background Briefing archives and go to an interview from April 14, 2025 when we spoke with Steven Simon, a visiting professor and distinguished fellow at Dartmouth College, who served on the National Security Council staff as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs from 2011 to 2012. He also worked on the NSC staff on counterterrorism and Middle East security policy. Currently he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy institute for Responsible Statecraft and was formerly a Fellow in International Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the co-author, among other books, of The Age of Sacred Terror, and his latest book is Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East and he had an article at The New York Times we discussed, “The US Must now Reckon With a Hegemon in the MidEast: Israel.
An Interview on the Creep of Fascism From June of 2025
Then we go to an interview from June 9, 2025 with Barbara Walter, the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego and one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terror. The author of five books, her latest is the New York Times bestseller How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. She joined us to assess Trump’s two-pronged strategies of scaring off protests against him and instigating provocations to justify a fascist takeover.