When Faith Gets in the Way of Understanding the World

In her Salon review of "Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President," by Justin Frank, Laura Miller writes, “Bush's born-again Christianity, an anomaly in his patrician East Coast clan, serves a similar function. For Bush, faith is less about the joyful worship of God in a community of believers (as Frank points out, he seldom attends church) than it is about forcing a structure on both the world and his own life without the risks inherent in a genuine attempt to understand either one.”

The world is a complicated, combustible place. This November Americans would be wise to elect the candidate who genuinely makes the effort to understand geopolitical complexities in order to better shape the future, and not welcome with self-righteous glee the so-called Armageddon.