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Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror” hanging in Iranian bookstores Tehran Times TEHRAN – A Persian translation of American historian Barbara Tuchman’s narrative history book “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century” has recently appeared in Iranian bookstores. Mahi is the publisher of the Persian translation and Hassan Afshar is the translator of the book first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1978. It won a 1980 U.S. National Book Award in History. The book’s focus is the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, which caused widespread suffering in Europe in the ...

In the wake of so many clerical sex abuse scandals, to many people the Catholic Church appears hypocritical and bankrupt morally and spiritually. In the midst of such trying times, how can Catholics justify remaining in the Church? The words and deeds of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Dominican Mantelatta—or penitential woman—who lived during an earlier crisis, can offer us some guidance and hope. Catherine lived in worse times than our own because it was not only the Church that seemed to be collapsing, but larger society and even the world itself. The Black Death, or bubonic plagu...

When Europe was hit with plague in the 14th century, the Church offered its frightened followers indulgences, not spiritual comfort, a pattern that Haredi leaders are repeating today. But the influence peddling may be hitting a wall

For most of the recent past, economic geography has shifted to ever-larger cities across the globe. By the end of the last decade, many were convinced that we were entering a supreme era of the glittering, high-rise “superstar” city that would inevitably swallow all the best bits of the economy, and serve as unparalleled centers of tech, culture, political activism, and global trade. Globally, the ranks of city-dwellers more than doubled over the last 40 years, from 1.5 billion in 1975 to 3.5 billion according to data from the OECD. Yet now this urban-centric pattern may be slowing, and e...