Homage

The Argentine player, who brought his international career to an end on August 31, 2026, was nothing less than a magician of the stadiums. His journey, made of wonders, falls and redemption, may tell us something about our undiminished need for enchantment in a world that nevertheless claims to have rid itself of it. Announced a few weeks after the 2026 World Cup final lost to Spain, Lionel Messi’s international retirement inevitably stirred an emotion for which it is difficult to find many equivalents in the recent history of football. One would probably have to go back to Maradona, or perhaps to Cruyff or Pelé, to recover that sense that, with the retirement of a player, something disappears that extends far beyond the sport itself, as though a certain way of inhabiting football, perhaps even of believing in it, were also coming to an end.

What remains of Hassan Rifai is the image of a respected, composed jurist, an authority on administrative and constitutional law, arguing in a calm, quavering voice as he pointed out the deviations and failings of politicians in relation to the parliamentary democratic system and the Constitution. And yet, the former MP and minister, who died on September 3, 2025, was also a man in revolt. A dissenter. Even at one hundred. Especially at one hundred! He had been one as a child, haranguing crowds in Baalbeck against the Mandate, and remained one throughout his career as a lawyer and parliamentarian.

Every year, when the second of June comes around, Samir Kassir rises back into memory as though he had never truly left. The years go by, faces change, circumstances and events follow one upon another, yet there are certain people the passing of time cannot reduce to mere remembrance. They remain present in the details of our lives, in the words we write, in the ideas we defend, in the dreams that never had time to be fulfilled. Twenty-one years have passed since the assassination of Samir Kassir, and I still have the feeling that that ill-fated morning has not really ended. Samir was not, for me, a journalist or a writer or a thinker whose articles and ideas I followed from a distance. He was a friend, an exceptional human being who possessed that rare ability to reconcile profound culture with human simplicity, intellectual boldness with personal warmth.

Fourteen years already. Fourteen years have passed since Nassir al-Assaad’s departure, and yet my brother’s memory remains intact in the hearts of all those who knew him, loved him, esteemed him, or simply crossed his path on the road toward a Lebanon he dreamed of as free, sovereign, and dignified. Nassir belonged to that generation of men who sought neither the spotlight nor honours. He believed deeply in just causes without ever seeking any personal gain from them. A discreet but determined artisan of the Cedar Revolution of 2005, alongside Samir, Fares, Elias and Samir, but also Walid, Gebran and others, he had understood early on that Lebanon could not survive without freedom, without pluralism, and without a State.

The feast of Saint Joseph (March 19), patron of the university that bears his name, brought to the mind of its new rector, Father François Boëdec, SJ, the memory of Alban de Jerphanion, the first Jesuit martyr of the seemingly endless war that erupted in Lebanon in 1975 – whose latest chapter, hoped to be the last, began unfolding in early March. Five other martyrs of that conflict fell after Father de Jerphanion. In tribute to their sacrifice, and with the publication of a new biography devoted to one of their holiest figures – the Dutch priest Nicolas Kluiters, whose cause for beatification is under way – this work is presented here, revealing previously unpublished details about the motivations of those who killed Father Nicolas. At the same time, it sheds light on the broader meaning of the gift he made to Lebanon, so that the country might endure as a model of “freedom and pluralism” for both East and West, at a moment when a heavily militarized nation threatens to strip it of a vital part of its territory, marked by the memory of Christ’s passage.

The feast of Saint Joseph (March 19), patron of the university that bears his name, brought to the mind of its new rector, Father François Boëdec, SJ, the memory of Alban de Jerphanion, the first Jesuit martyr of the seemingly endless war that erupted in Lebanon in 1975 – whose latest chapter, hoped to be the last, began unfolding in early March. Five other martyrs of that conflict fell after Father de Jerphanion. In tribute to their sacrifice, and with the publication of a new biography devoted to one of their holiest figures – the Dutch priest Nicolas Kluiters, whose cause for beatification is under way – this work is presented here, revealing previously unpublished details about the motivations of those who killed Father Nicolas. At the same time, it sheds light on the broader meaning of the gift he made to Lebanon, so that the country might endure as a model of “freedom and pluralism” for both East and West, at a moment when a heavily militarized nation threatens to strip it of a vital part of its territory, marked by the memory of Christ’s passage.

The feast of Saint Joseph (March 19), patron of the University that bears his name, brought back to the memory of its new rector, François Boëdec s.j., the recollection of Alban de Jerphanion, the first Jesuit martyr of the interminable war that broke out in 1975 in Lebanon, and a new episode of which, hopefully the last, opened in early March. Five other martyrs of this war fell after Father de Jerphanion. As a sign of homage, and with the publication of a new biography dedicated to one of their holiest figures, that of the Dutch priest Nicolas Kluiters, whose beatification process has begun, we present here this work, which includes unpublished details on the motivations of those who killed Father Nicolas. We also take this opportunity to highlight the general meaning of the gift he made to Lebanon, so that our homeland remains a model of "liberty and pluralism" for the East and the West, at the very moment when a militarized nation threatens to amputate an essential part of its territory bearing the memory of Christ's passage.

It is no easy task to compress, within a few lines and paragraphs, the trajectory of a great historian who lived nearly a century and who remained, until his final days, immersed in research, writing, and reflection — his mind never ceasing to follow what unfolded in his homeland. His cause was always singular: Palestine. Walid Khalidi, who left us just days ago, gathered throughout his long life many remarkable qualities, the most defining of which — attested repeatedly by those who knew him and borne out by his research and books — was that he served as the guardian of the Nakba's narrative and the very man who dismantled the Zionist account of Palestine.

Twenty years ago, Gebran Tueini was literally pulverized in a car-bomb attack. His assassins from the Damascus–Tehran axis, together with their Lebanese accomplices, had placed him on the blacklist of “dangerous personalities” to be eliminated at all costs, insofar as the latter had managed, within a few years, to reconstitute a distinctly Lebanese idea of a plural and coherent front, one that guaranteed sovereignty and freedom. A compact front, capable of transcending the divisions inherited from the civil war and the sectarian compartmentalizations on which the axis had waltzed for decades in order to divide the Lebanese more effectively, and thereby establish itself as the authority responsible for settling the very conflicts it had itself created, according to the classic logic of the arsonist-firefighter.

Passing away on December 9, 2019, Môrice Awwad remains an exception in the Lebanese cultural and literary landscape. This is the portrait of a rebellious man — shortlisted in 2015 for the Nobel Prize in Literature — and of his visceral relationship with the mother tongue, the vernacular, Lebanese, which he turned into his banner, his matrix-territory, and his reason for being. Môrice Awwad was born in 1934 into a Greater Lebanon still at its first hesitant steps, yet already traversed by the tension of everything to come: independence, the golden age, then violence and the return to servitude. But it is not his birth that matters so much as the birth of language inside him. One must imagine that Awwad was immersed — almost literally — in a Lebanese linguistic placenta, strange as the image may be, in the entrails of his mother. “I remember hearing my mother cry when I was still inside her,” he would later write. From childhood on, in the house in Bsalim, a bond forms — and it will never come undone: the language of his mother — spoken Lebanese — becomes his first home. The only one that will never crack.