Joe Biden

Friday Prayers at Tehran University: Photo by Daniel Smith

Friday prayers at Tehran University’s converted, covered football (soccer) stadium places us at the heart of the intersection between Iran’s public and its political and religious leadership. There would be few places in American society where Church and State, politics and society, preaching and teaching would be so closely linked since the pre-revolutionary days of the 16th and 17th Centuries, when the Puritan pulpit would have played a similar role of defining values, creating cohesion, and admonishing adherence.