This week’s guest is Shadi Hamid. 

Shadi Hamid is a columnist at The Washington Post and a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Previously, he was research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary as well as a longtime senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Hamid's newest book is The Case for American Power(Simon & Schuster). He is also the author of several other books, including The Problem of Democracy, as well as the co-editor of Rethinking Political Islam. His book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on foreign affairs. In 2019, Hamid was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine. He is also the co-founder of Wisdom of Crowds, a podcast, newsletter, and debate platform. Hamid received his B.S. and M.A. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and his Ph.D. in political science from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

His newest book argues that America, for all its contradictions and failures, is still, in his words, “the last best hope for a more moral and just world.”

In this conversation, we press him on that claim. Is it possible for a nation-state to act morally? What happens when faith traditions rooted in humility and sacrifice collide with the logic of power? And what do we do when moral conviction itself becomes a weapon — in foreign policy, in Gaza, and even in our domestic politics?

Shadi calls his book a “love letter to America,” but the conversation quickly becomes a debate about what love looks like and what it demands when the country you love commits moral wrongs.

It’s a conversation about belief and realism, religion and responsibility, power and purity and whether the only way to redeem power is to take it.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.