Richard Penaskovic

Richard Penaskovic studied at the University of Innsbruck, the University of Würzburg, and the University of Munich where he received the Ph.D., magna cum laude, and has taught over 50 courses in religious studies during his 40 years in academia. He has over 100 publications to his credit, 26 of them in peer-reviewed books and journals. Penaskovic has made presentations at several colleges and universities in the U.S.,e.g., Syracuse University, Providence College, but also at the University of Toronto, the Free University in Amsterdam, the University of Salzburg, Austria, Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and the London School of Economics. He feels most at home in Newman and Augustinian Studies, ecclesiology, and ecumenism, understood in a wide sense as encompassing inter-faith dialogue.

Featured

From Gaza to America and Vietnam, the Prospect of a Peacemaker Pope

Richard Penaskovic

Auburn, Al. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – It’s not surprising that Pope Leo XIV took the name Leo in honor of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903). Why so? In 1891, Leo XIII wrote the encyclical, Rerum Novarum, that stated Capital and Labor must cooperate and there should be a just wage for workers. Leo also […]

Featured

The Truth about Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers

Richard Penaskovic

Auburn, Al. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Author Zeke Hernandez’s new book is The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024: $30.00). The author, an immigrant born in Uruguay, lived in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Argentina, before coming to the US. Hernandez received his B.A. and M.A. […]

Featured

NATO must rethink Expansion Plans, step back from Precipice of Nuclear Confrontation with Russia

Richard Penaskovic

Auburn, Alabama (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – There’s a history to the war between Russia and the West going back to the Cold War and the unification between East and West Germany. Thomas Friedman once asked George Kennan, (the architect of the US Cold War strategy on containment), what he thought about NATO expansion, […]

NATO

Diplomacy, not total Victory, will in the End Settle the Ukraine War

Richard Penaskovic

Russia’s attack on the Ukraine certainly violated international law and Vladimir Putin should be charged as a war criminal for Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, schools, apartment buildings and the like, in which innocent civilians were killed or injured for life, both physically, emotionally, and mentally. The decision of the Biden administration to wage total […]

Artificial Intelligence

By 2030, Today’s World will be Made Over

Richard Penaskovic

This article reviews Mauro F. Guillén’s recent book, 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide And Reshape The Future of Everything, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020). $28.99. Guillén is the Zandman Professor in International Management at the Wharton School of Penn and an expert on global market trends. This book has eight chapters, a […]

Authoritarianism

The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning

Richard Penaskovic

Auburn, Al. (Special to Informed Comment) – In this article I review the The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump by Dan P. McAdams [click], published by Oxford University Press in 2020. McAdams is a pre-eminent expert in personality theory and the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University who does research on […]

China

Maybe Try Friendship? Hatred and Enmity are bad Politics for America and a World in Crisis

Richard Penaskovic

We live in an era where animosity and even rage are the norm in the political arena. Both Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided in Congress so that little can be done legislatively. Correspondingly, millions of families are often split down the middle in terms of their political views with relatives divided among Democrats, Republicans […]