Salomé slides her svelte figure through a cracked-open double door near the front of the dark sanctuary.

Click clack. It’s the first moment of the vigil of Easter at Church of the Most Holy Redeemer in Manhattan’s East Village. Worshippers at this historic Catholic church can only hear her stiletto heels, faint and staccato, as she walks to its organ.

She steps carefully up the old stone steps to the console, flicking on a reading light that illuminates her sharp features. As more parishioners walk in, she begins to play a mournful introduction, marking the last moments of Lent in what is now a quiet cacophony of footsteps.

This is the organist’s sixth gig in four days during Holy Week, which she says is “kind of fashion week for Catholics.” A classically trained musician, she is also an artist and model. Earlier this year at an uptown literary ball, she walked a runway for Elena Velez, a well-known designer who’s been called the enfant terrible of the fashion world, modeling her controversial “Gone With the Wind”-inspired clothing line during the actual New York Fashion Week. 

The church is tucked into a street of 19th-century tenements between Avenues A and B in the East Village, a neighborhood that once embodied New York’s bohemian clichés. Right next to it is Graveyard NYC, a heavy-metal tattoo parlor. A few blocks away, the legendary CBGB nightclub, shuttered in 2006, was one of the birthplaces of punk. In 1990, local artists and musicians staged a legendary Resist 2 Exist festival in nearby Tompkins Square, then a drug market and homeless tent city, sparking a near riot when police shut it down.

The neighborhood may have long since gentrified, but Salomé, her confirmation name-turned-celebrity mononym, has been part of a new cadre of young New York artists who have been raging against a different cause: the cultural rot and decadence brought about by “libtards.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A punk store called Search & Destroy – one of the few left on St. Marks Place, a street that was one of the centers of the punk counterculture movement in the past – is now next to a bubble tea store.

“Leftists see greatness, and they see beauty, and they’re threatened by it, and they want to destroy it,” says Salomé, who says the Tridentine Mass is “the greatest work of art” for its superior musical composition. 

Originally from Philadelphia, Salomé has been a devout Catholic since she was young. She wears a “Make America Great Again” hat around town sometimes as an act of ironic defiance. And even though she’s a transgender woman, she prefers the term of an earlier age: castrato. 

But first and foremost, she says, she’s a child of God.

“I’m just Catholic here. I sort of refuse to identify myself with any other label, gender, sexuality, political,” Salomé says. “I’m Catholic, and I’m an artist. And so because I’m an artist, I’m interested in all ideas. And I happen to have been born in a time when that is not OK.”

Clack. Click. At the end of the service, Salomé steps into the vestibule’s yellow light, her 3-inch black pumps clearly visible now. It’s late in the evening, but she’s wearing a pair of chunky onyx sunglasses that hide her piercing blue eyes, eyes that have locked with French creative directors as well as Italian priests during confession. A wrinkleless, stone-colored Prada trenchcoat presses tightly against her frame.

Parishioners exit the church making their last signs of the cross, and Salomé click-clacks quickly down Third Street, disappearing into a crowd of 20-something pleasure-seekers in the East Village’s array of cannabis shops and street vendors. She’s heading toward the heart of lower Manhattan’s conservative counterculture, an area near Chinatown recently dubbed Dimes Square. 

“New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church”

In many ways, the Dimes Square scene began when young New Yorkers, skaters and creative types sick and tired of pandemic restrictions, began to rebel. 

Some embraced virtual environments and the technology that made them possible, and edgy podcasts and snarky Substack blogs have always been part of the scene’s driving force. But a good number of New York youth saw art and literature as something meant to be shared in person. 

Maskless parties started up. A playwright and conservative magazine contributor began staging his work in living rooms. A new local newspaper/neighborhood bulletin called The Drunken Canal began documenting the punklike disregard among local youths for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s rules.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The novelist Jordan Castro reads his religious-themed stories to a full crowd at Earth, a literary salon in New York’s Lower East Side.

“Young people want presence,” says Tara Isabella Burton, a bestselling novelist and Oxford-trained theologian. “It’s normal, what’s going on. It happened in the 19th century where you saw dandies rebel against automation and industrialization, which affected the politics and the aesthetics of the time.” 

The restaurant Dimes at the corner of Canal and Division streets near Chinatown became a haunt for an array of hip New York creatives seeking to liberate themselves from both social and ideological shackles. As a pun on Times Square, the gritty area at the border of the Lower East Side became known as Dimes Square. 

“I certainly don’t need to tell you that this place is also, emphatically, not in Brooklyn,” wrote the leftist Substack blogger Mike Crumplar in 2022, with a bit of snark. “You already know how Brooklyn is too political, too woke, too soft, too soy, too consumed by cancel culture to be a fertile climate for artistic expression. You’ve already heard about how the vibes are shifting back to downtown Manhattan, which is grittier and sleazier. It’s a place where older literary men can have younger muses, free from the prudish Robespierres of the North Brooklyn [Democratic Socialists of America].”

The podcast “Red Scare,” begun in 2018 and hosted by cultural critics Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, was among the first to popularize the term “Dimes Square.” Associated with the “dirtbag left” – a term that described zealous Bernie Sanders supporters who eschewed civility and prioritized disruption – the hosts later became disillusioned by the movement and explored the ideas of the “new right,” the Donald Trump-led movement that also stands against neoliberalism, global capitalism, and corporate hegemony. Their guests have included people such as Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. 

Ms. Nekrasova is also a devout Catholic, even if she likes to quip, “Catholic, like Andy Warhol.” An actor who had a recurring role in the popular HBO series “Succession,” she has hosted podcasts on obscure theological topics. 

“People accuse me of being fascist or a cultural conservative,” she says in an interview. “I actually feel more like a degenerate artistically. ... I’m a free speech absolutist.” 

Both she and Ms. Khachiyan have been outspoken against what they see as the godless politics of the left. “No hell, no dignity,” Ms. Nekrasova once said. 

Partly because of their influence, the Dimes Square scene began to include a number of artists with more conservative and religious visions. Writers, filmmakers, and fashion designers have been dabbling in pre-Vatican II Catholicism. They play the church organ rather than DJ at nightclubs. Instead of free love and polyamory, they espouse commitment and monogamy. And the flip phone is a favorite accessory – a statement against the herd and its iPhones.

“New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church,” proclaimed Julia Yost, senior editor at First Things magazine, in a 2022 essay in The New York Times. “Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour,” she wrote of the Dimes Square scene. “Disaffection with the progressive moral majority – combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion – has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism. 

“This is not your grandmother’s church – and whether the new faithful are performing an act of theater or not, they have the chance to revitalize the church for young, educated Americans.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“Trad culture is not bad for you. Neither is having an objective standard of meaning and not wanting to sleep with 10,000 people.” – Jordan Castro, author of “The Novelist: A Novel.” Mr. Castro poses outside before he gives a reading on Orchard Street in New York's Lower East Side. He converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity after falling in love with its liturgy.

A literary salon for the 21st century

Jordan Castro looks with wonder at the audience gathered here at Earth, a literary salon and gallery on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. About 300 people, mostly young and many dressed in monochrome cool, have packed the place to hear the young novelist talk about his work. 

Earth’s literary salon has been attracting large crowds of people drawn to a literary scene known for its critiques of liberal hegemony in the arts. Its readings and discussions often feature writers who present ideas with witty and at times caustic, ironic prose.

Mr. Castro has long been an alternative-literature darling, too. He was the editor of New York Tyrant Magazine, an avant-garde publication specializing in experimental writing. Rugged with wild brown hair and kind, dark eyes and wearing an olive fatigue, he wrote an essay in Harper’s Magazine on body building that went viral. He’s like a Christian Ken Kesey with a neck tattoo of Ohio, his home state.

“I think for me, the best literature ... can kind of reveal aspects of life or reality or the psyche or the soul that can reveal those things in sort of unique and compelling ways, so that we can kind of become more attuned to our condition,” Mr. Castro says in an interview. His first book, “The Novelist: A Novel,” is considered a work of “autofiction,” and has received glowing reviews.

The room is hot, so the door stays open as the overflow builds just outside the gallery’s storefront space. A young woman peers inside on the shoulders of a friend or lover. An imposing figure whose head practically met the ceiling just outside the door scans the crowd looking like Jesus. Some stray voice in the crowd calls him “LePuff.” Young people in grunge-inspired fits and fashion-forward couture squeeze into the corner by the refreshments.

Other readers include the doyenne of Dimes Square, Ms. Nekrasova of “Red Scare,” and Tao Lin, another autofiction writer. Mr. Castro’s wife, the writer Nicolette Polek, hosted a reading a month ago from her new book, “Bitter Water Opera,” which The New Yorker magazine called one of the best books of 2024.  

True monogamy and traditional Christianity are the last taboos to many, says Mr. Castro, who fell in love with the Eastern Orthodox liturgy and converted a few years ago. He explains how true faith and love freed him from moral rot and a past life consumed by heroin addiction.

“I strive to be undistracted,” he remarks. “Christianity has taught me to pay attention to the important things. I love Jesus, man. Especially when he’s ranting at the spoiled temple in John.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A crowd gathers at a salon in the Dimes Square area of lower Manhattan to hear writers read from their religious-themed work.

He reads poems and stories with a charisma that beams through his smile. The crowd giggles at his insights and claps louder at his lyrical flourishes. Often awkward around strangers, he is comfortable on this makeshift stage. “Trad culture is not bad for you. Neither is having an objective standard of meaning and not wanting to sleep with 10,000 people,” he says.

As a writer and artist, Mr. Castro believes the power of literature can be an entryway into deeper faith – the same theme his wife, Ms. Polek, pursues in her fiction. 

“I think that when people get rid of a transcendent standard of meaning – you know, get rid of a sort of idea of a truth that we can all agree on, something that sort of transcends our own individual whims or preferences – I think when you get rid of that power, it’s sort of just your will versus my will.

"And then, you know, if we’re going to live harmoniously, harmoniously with each other," he continues, "we have to have something that can unite us, that sort of transcends our desires, which can change at any moment and which are sort of, you know, untrustworthy.”

A taboo against taboos

Click clack. Salomé steps into the screening room of Sovereign House, a subterranean loft and underground artists space in Chinatown.

She’s wearing a sheer black gown and an Arctic fur stole, and she holds aloft a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath. Fans gather in a circle to greet the musician and model. She’s a well-recognized presence in the Dimes Square scene. It’s a screening for her most recent creative turn: She acted in a short film titled “Envy/Desire.”

“We’re just kind of reinventing, like, how do you make a movie?” Salomé says. “It’s made by someone who’s not a filmmaker, and acted by people who are sort of not actors. Yeah, it’s like a new thing. It’s not so much like an intentional, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this because we’re going to insert this belief.’” 

The film recalls the do-it-yourself quality of a John Waters film, and it’s about a transgender woman who believes she may have found the man of her dreams. But his interest in her may reveal his own questions about his gender. Afterward, the crowd claps for the creative team as it takes bows under warm stage lights, and many linger for the Q&A.

Sovereign House is a salon started by Nick Allen, a New York tech worker who wanted to create a space for more dissident Dimes Square artists. They host parties for newly launched magazines, stage new plays, and even just engage in conversations about art and literature. (The tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel has also helped fund an “antiwoke” film festival in Manhattan.) 

The underground event space has rustic columns separating the foyer from the screening room area. Ironically, the patio out back overlooks the headquarters of the Democratic Socialists in New York. 

A general vibe in Dimes Square is that no ideas are off-limits – a reaction to what many artists see as the stifling censorship of left-wing “cancel culture.” The salon at Sovereign House has hosted speakers such as Steve Sailer, a far-right thinker. In the past, Mr. Sailer has said Black people “possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and need moral guidance from society.

But the underground salon in Chinatown has also included a number of religiously conservative artists and thinkers.

Courtesy of Jacob Anthony amaro

“I don’t want anyone to say anything conventional. ... I like to poke fun at conventional discourse.” – Stephen G. Adubato, New York writer and professor. Mr. Adubato prepares remarks at a launch party for a new issue of his publication, Cracks in Postmodernity, at Sovereign House in Chinatown last October.

Bucking against convention

On a cold October night last fall, Stephen G. Adubato was chatting up guests at Sovereign House while wearing a “Newark” patched bomber jacket and sporting a freshly cut fade. Around his neck is a gold cross – the writer and professor of philosophy and religion is a devout Catholic.

He’s here to talk about the latest issue of his project Cracks in Postmodernity, which includes a Substack, zine, and podcast. It’s been catching on with a downtown set of writers, and a big crowd has gathered to hear him read from his latest issue. 

The master of ceremonies for the evening, Brennan Vickery, a local bartender who is a regular presence at Sovereign House, contributes to Mr. Adubato’s project. He warms up the crowd. 

“Alex Jones, who I by no means am a fan of, but he said this thing that kind of stuck with me, and it is kind of true,” he says afterward. “He’s like, Do you want to go to a house party that’s with liberal people or conservative people? If you go to a liberal party these days, it’s like, you can’t say this, you can’t say that. ... It’s going to be subdued. No one can be offensive. So who do you want to party with?”

Like Salomé, Mr. Adubato only accepts the label Catholic. He says he does not consider himself a conservative, per se, but he accepts the full moral teachings of Catholicism. He initially said his project was intended “to explore the ways that our contemporary culture points us to the truth of Christ.” He changed it to an edgier description: “subverting subversiveness through pretentious and ironic cultural commentary that gives precedence to aesthetics and ontology over ethics and politics.” 

“I don’t want anyone to say anything conventional,” Mr. Adubato says in an interview. “I don’t want anything predictable. I don’t want anyone to sound like they’re reading off of a script. That being said, I also think there’s a certain limit. I like to be risqué. I like to poke fun at conventional discourse. I’m trying to serve a higher purpose. There’s a point where it could become self-indulgent. Where you can say something very hurtful to somebody.”

He’s nervous tonight. Onstage in a pair of white Nikes, he shakes a bit with his eyes glued to the pages in front of him – a short story about a blue-haired liberal “getting owned” by a believer in the Almighty. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The Catholic Worker Maryhouse in New York’s East Village.

Mr. Adubato has been visiting other downtown venues to publicize his project. At another event at The Catholic Worker Maryhouse on Third Street in the East Village, not far from Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, over 120 people come on a cold Monday night. 

He discusses the growing interest in religion in these downtown Manhattan haunts. 

“People are tired of pure secularism. It’s a dead end. It doesn’t promise anything,” he says in an interview afterward. “There are people who are still into this spiritual thing and not being tied to any institutional religion. Some people are still into the new age stuff, which in a way has a value. I get why people are still drawn to it. 

“But I am seeing more people being drawn to organized religion, whether it’s Catholicism or branches of Protestantism or Islam or Judaism, because there is something a little more concrete about the promises that practicing these religions gives you.”

The communal spirit at these events focusing on religious issues has been growing.

“When you go to a church, it’s very clear what’s being asked of you, and you can share that path with other people. We want that. We want to be together,” says Mr. Adubato. “We want to understand what our lives are for. We don’t want this vagueness anymore.”

Courtesy of Jacob Anthony amaro

Two attendees at the inaugural event for Cracks in Postmodernity laugh it up at The Catholic Worker Maryhouse in New York’s East Village.

In search of community

Audrey Horne hangs her winter coat on the wicker chair before she sits down to a hot cup of coffee at Café Kitsuné in Manhattan’s West Village. Her blue eyes scan the Saturday afternoon crowd. In the corner, a man in a two-piece suit adds final touches to a fashion sketch in front of him, an emerald-hued pastry reduced to crumbs beside him.

She’s made a name for herself as a writer and thinker simply by posting on online forums and the social media site X, where she has 32,000 followers, including editors and writers from Harper’s and The New Yorker.

She spends a lot of time in Washington, D.C., where she’s become part of a similar scene of religious thinkers and seekers meeting to discuss art and literature. But she remains a voice in the Dimes Square crowd.

“I kind of grew an audience through fighting people online and telling people how lonely I was, and just being really brutally honest,” she says. “People responded to that in a really unprecedented way.”

Sitting upright, Ms. Horne doesn’t telegraph “bohemian layabout.” But her attendance at downtown readings and literary salons speaks to the curiosity that had remained unquenched in her youth. She spent much of her childhood in the Two by Twos religious sect, witnessing an FBI raid on what has been labeled a cult. She now says she’s a nondenominational Protestant Christian. 

She was living in Seattle before the pandemic, and she describes how she became weary and even a bit alienated from the politics of women’s marches, liberal arrogance, and political correctness. 

“And then I listened to this podcast from New York, ‘Red Scare,’” she says. “It was really exciting, because these are women who historically, I would assume, would be totally opposed to me. But they were saying things I kind of felt and agreed with deep down. ... At the time, there was, like, a sense of almost revenge, and it was kind of delicious. Yeah, I was just intoxicated.”

So she moved to the East Coast – just before the COVID-19 shutdown. Isolated and lonely, she began to get into arguments online in the style of “Red Scare.” As she got noticed, she started getting out and hitting up Dimes Square watering holes, where she met up with like-minded artists rebelling against what they saw as liberal hegemony. For the first time, she felt comfortable in a secular world of artists and bohemian layabouts, bon vivants, and culture vultures. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A Frenchie plays with a ball at a dog park in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. Once a center of punk dissent, the area now caters to a more gentrified, conventional residential scene.

But all the aggressiveness and snark and irony now seems to have gone too far in the scene, she says. 

“I’ve had to learn to hold a lot of complexity,” Ms. Horne says. “And that has made me, I think and I hope, far less judgmental, far more open, and far more forgiving of myself and of others and their forms of exploring.”

Part of this spirit of tolerance, she says, is arising out of many people’s earnest search for meaning. And a lot of that has to do with a growing interest in religion. “There’s something in the air right now that does feel much more open to faith,” says Ms. Horne. “I think that culture now feels a lot more – a lot softer, like people are curious about it and seeking it. And not just seeking it, but the real truth underlying the life of faith. ... It has made space for me to jump in and express what I believe to be true.” 

“We want something pure. We want something earnest,” she continues. “I hate to say a new sincerity, but it feels like a return to sincerity. I do think that that’s what feels most fresh right now [in the arts]. Like, it’s not even funny to be anti-irony. Like, just don’t even reference yourself; don’t talk about postirony, post-culture war. That’s what we’re kind of tired of.”

A sense of belonging

Mr. Vickery, Cracks in Postmodernity’s emcee, is standing outside the salon, hanging out near Sovereign House with a crew of bushy-haired 20-somethings. The conversation turns to the place of gay men in the LGBTQ+ community.

Despite being gay himself, Mr. Vickery says gay men are not really a part of this “intersectional” identity. “We’re different historically,” he says.

He never felt he fit in with the other tribes of gay men clustered in Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea on the West Side, those who were onto “a new cause every week.” 

“I think the reason that [artists here] are socially conservative – or at least they pretend to be in this punk kind of element – is because they don’t want to be told what to do and what to make and what not to say.”

He tried his hand at acting and painting and publishing after he left the Florida Panhandle for New York, and he grew at odds with a lot of the decadence and ugliness in the city, he says. But he fits in here with aggressive, free-thinking conservatives.

“A lot is so dirty and confusing now,” Mr. Vickery says. “People want order. They want something beautiful. But will this scene live on? Will the ideas matter? I’d be interested in seeing if it’ll have an effect.”

Editor's note: This story has been edited to correct Ms. Khachiyan's religious status.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Anton Palyey, the military-appointed administrator for Staryi Saltiv, poses outside the village's brand-new school that will replace one destroyed by Russian forces in 2022, in Staryi Saltiv, Ukraine, May 30, 2024.

Anton Palyey stands proudly before the new three-story school building, its cheery accents of bright paint soon to greet returning students.

It was built to replace the school destroyed by Russian shelling in 2022, when enemy forces occupied this lakeside resort village just 12 miles from the Russian border. Staryi Saltiv was recaptured in a counteroffensive in the fall of 2022.

“If there is no school, no hospital, and no state services, people won’t stay here or consider coming back,” says Mr. Palyey, who has served as Staryi Saltiv’s military-appointed administrator since Ukrainian forces took the village back.

Pointing to the northern horizon, where a plume of dark smoke rises over the town of Vovchansk – destroyed in a surprise Russian cross-border offensive in May – the village administrator describes his job as equal parts services provider and chief reassurer/morale booster.

“With a so-called neighbor like the one we have, capable of doing that at any moment,” he says, nodding toward the smoke, “it’s understandable that people feel so much fear about living here.”

“Our job as a government,” he adds, “is to show the local people that these villages are not abandoned, that they can feel confident that there is a future for this place.”

Hope vs. trepidation

The brand-new school building, and the view of a smoldering town some 30 miles across the river valley, offer a stark juxtaposition of the hope and trepidation that permeate the dozens of villages along the Ukraine war’s front lines.

Many of those villages, like Staryi Saltiv, were once occupied by Russian forces and are now trying to rebuild and recover – despite a nagging worry that the war could engulf them once again.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Lidiia Chatchenko, unofficial mayor of the settlement of Rubizhne outside Staryi Saltiv, takes a load of provisions almost every day to the people still living in her tiny village, in Staryi Saltiv, Ukraine, May 30, 2024.

On the one hand, it’s true that many of Staryi Saltiv’s residential streets are quiet and abandoned, and that its summer population no longer jumps above 20,000, as it did when residents of prewar Kharkiv – Ukraine’s second-largest city – sought the soothing shores of the reservoir formed by the Siverskyi Donets River.

But on the other hand, there is also a deep sense of hope in the future. It’s seen not just in the new school, but also in the ongoing renovation of war-damaged apartment buildings and in the repeated repair of the temporary pontoon bridge that serves as a lifeline to families across the river. Hope is evident, too, in the welcoming committees that greet evacuees from nearby besieged towns like Vovchansk, where fierce fighting continued June 17.

“I’ve decided I’m not afraid anymore. I’m just going to do what I can to help the people of my village who only want to be able to remain in their homes,” says Lidiia Chatchenko, the unofficial mayor (she says it’s a big word for the modest assistance she provides) of the small settlement of Rubizhne outside Staryi Saltiv.

After she lost her house in Rubizhne in the Russian sweep into the area in 2022, Ms. Chatchenko moved to Staryi Saltiv. Now almost every day she loads up her old station wagon with World Food Programme provisions to take to the mostly older residents remaining in her village.

Doing what’s possible

Like others here, Ms. Chatchenko is careful not to sound too naively optimistic about the future. She says Russia is using larger bombs and deadlier tactics in its recent attacks, so she is steeling herself for what could happen if enemy forces were to advance through the area again.

But at the same time, she says she is impelled to do what she can to ease concerns and allow people to live in her village for as long as possible.

“Before the war, our little village was so beautiful. People were proud to keep up their small piece of our lovely area and show it to the world,” she says. “I really hope what I’m doing helps people stay in their homes so we can be that beautiful place again someday.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Vadym Morozov poses at the residential repair project where he is foreman, in Staryi Saltiv, Ukraine, May 30, 2024. The projects he supervises, to repair damage from Russian missile strikes, include turning basements into bomb shelters.

That determination to keep Ukraine’s traumatized villages alive can be seen across Staryi Saltiv – from the numerous construction projects to the neat vegetable gardens behind many houses that suggest the promise of a future harvest.

At a construction site, while installing new insulation and basalt siding on an apartment building that took a direct hit in Russia’s assault, Vadym Morozov talks of returning Staryi Saltiv to its glory days as a summertime family retreat.

“Before the war I sometimes brought my family to the resorts here, and most of the time there were so many people you couldn’t find a place on the beach,” says the construction foreman from Sumy, a neighboring region. “People here want to have that again in the future,” he adds, “and I feel like we’re doing our part to make that possible.”

Still, Mr. Morozov is careful to temper his lofty dreams with some realism. He notes, for example, that in all of the multistory residential building repairs he’s done in Staryi Saltiv, upgrading basements to fortified shelters has been a top priority.

“Considering where we are and what could be an uncertain future,” he says, “putting in the shelters is a really important part of our job now.”

Hopes for a tomato harvest

Across the highway in a neighborhood of traditional single-story houses with tidy gardens, Alla Nahorna expresses the same mix of optimism and caution forged by more than two years of a grinding, up-close war.

“We love living here; it really has been an idyllic place,” she says as she offers a bowl of fresh-picked strawberries to passersby. “But it’s also true that we don’t have another place to go.”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Alla Nahorna, in her garden in Staryi Saltiv, plans to can her tomatoes this fall, an expression of her confidence in the future.

From the shade of a neighbor’s tree, husband Anatolyy recounts how he grew up in the house where he and Ms. Nahorna live, how as a boy growing up in a peaceful village he fished in the reservoir and made the wooden cross that still hangs around his neck.

But he motions up and down the quiet street outside their home, and sighs. “Only four families live here now,” he says. “Everyone else has left.” The couple’s son and daughter and grandchildren now live in Kharkiv, 28 miles away.

Ms. Nahorna says she can’t blame people for leaving. “You feel the walls shaking when the bombs fall; you don’t know when and where it’s going to happen.” Indeed, a bomb hit Staryi Saltiv June 12, destroying a house and wounding three inhabitants.

But then she stops and seems to reconsider the dark path her words were taking, and looks at her garden.

“I really think our biggest problem is the lack of rain,” she says, surveying her rows of tomato plants. “As long as it rains, I’ll be canning my tomatoes again like I do every year.”

To which she adds – not, it seems, as an afterthought, but out of conviction: “And we will fight and we will win this war – and this will be a very good place to live once again.”

Oleksandr Naselenko assisted in reporting this story.

From the battlefields of Ukraine to the seas around the Middle East, U.S. commanders are getting a glimpse into what wars of the future will look like, and they say one thing is clear: The horizon line will be teeming with drones.

Ukrainian soldiers remotely controlling quadcopters are now engaging in midair dogfights, searching for blind spots to knock out the rudders of uncrewed Russian crafts rigged with bombs.

Kyiv earlier this year was forced to sideline U.S. Abrams tanks, because too many were being destroyed by drones, The Associated Press reported in April. (This was after many months of lobbying Washington to finally get 31 of them, worth some $10 million each.)

At the same time, Department of Defense officials express frustration that the Navy must use pricey missiles to shoot down far more affordable Iranian-made drones launched by Houthi rebels into the Red Sea. For the first time, the rebels earlier this month also used a remote-controlled ocean drone to force the crew of a Greek-owned vessel to abandon ship.

Unmanned vehicles, as they’re known in Pentagon parlance, are quickly becoming the “poor man’s cruise missile” – cheap and plentiful compared with the very fancy hardware they’re destroying, says Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. 

“Quantity now has a quality of its own – and our adversaries understand this,” he says. 

When the chief of the French army last week remarked that the dominance of drones is but “a snapshot in time,” some analysts compared it to early 20th-century commanders who dismissed airplanes and tanks “as only accessories to the man and the horse,” as a 1926 Times of London piece put it. 

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Camouflaged Hezbollah drones are displayed as the powerful, Iran-backed Shiite militia of Lebanon, opens a museum in Baalbek, Lebanon, Sept. 1, 2023. The site's displays of drones and surface-to-air-missiles aim to highlight Hezbollah’s growing fighting capacity.

Today’s drone developments are forcing the Pentagon to tear up many of the plans it once had for fighting wars and to get creative in developing new technologies, including directed-energy weapons like lasers.

“There’s really good and necessary experimentation happening,” says Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security think tank. 

At the same time, the Pentagon is asking itself some tough questions about the exquisite weapons on which it has long relied to execute U.S. military strategy – and that can be decades in development.

Whether these questions are tough enough, analysts add, remains to be seen.

U.S. soldiers fighting future wars “are going to be pummeled by the saturation of the drones on the battlefield,” says retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and now professor of practice at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “We have nothing like that ourselves – no offensive mass drone capability – and very limited ability to protect against it.” 

For the Pentagon, moving quickly to change this is the challenge and, historically, he adds, “the opposite of everything it’s designed to do.” 

“Learning from the battlefield”

The proliferation of inexpensive drones on the battlefield is not a brand-new development.

When the United States was helping Iraq fight off Islamic State (ISIS) forces massed in Mosul in 2016, the “year’s most daunting problem was an adaptive enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority ... in the form of commercially available drones,” Gen. Raymond Thomas, then head of U.S. Special Operations Command, said in 2017.

Around that time, another U.S. four-star general, David Perkins, complained to an Army conference audience that an ally had shot down a cheap off-the-shelf drone with a $3.4 million Patriot missile. 

“Now that worked – they got it,” he said. The problem is, “If I’m the enemy, I’m thinking, ‘Hey I’m just going to get on eBay and buy as many of these $300 quadcopters as I can and expend all the Patriot missiles out there.’” 

Recalling that same time period, Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo last month acknowledged, “It was really challenging to figure out how to actually defeat these small drones that were dropping bombs.” 

Bernat Armangue/AP

Drawings of drones and missiles that have been shot down are painted on the fuselage of a fighter jet stationed on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the Red Sea, June 11, 2024. The U.S.-led campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has turned into an intense running sea battle.

It was the beginning of a wake-up call for the Pentagon, and one driven home in January, when three U.S. service members, deployed to an outpost in Jordan as part of a campaign against ISIS, were killed in an attack by cheap exploding drones developed by Iran. 

The following month, the Army announced that it was canceling a crewed scout helicopter – the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, once a top priority for the service – in favor of investing more in uncrewed aircraft. 

Analysts pointed to this moment as an important shift in thinking. “We are learning from the battlefield,” Gen. Randy George, Army chief of staff, said in announcing the cancellation, “especially in Ukraine.”

Experimenting with new weapons 

Today, the Middle East “has become a sandbox of experimentation,” Dr. Pettyjohn says, as money once slated for the multibillion-dollar helicopter is being diverted into developing small attack drones and better counterdrone technologies.

“We’ve been successful in getting some prototypes out, and I think we’re beginning to learn a lot from those,” Undersecretary Camarillo said during a discussion last month.

This includes directed-energy weapons like lasers and microwave blasts, the latter of which are roughly 150,000 times more powerful than their namesake household appliance.

The Army is testing out directed-energy weapons in the field as it combats drones in the Middle East, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, told lawmakers in March.

But as Houthi rebels in Yemen step up drone strikes on ships in the Red Sea, he stressed that he’d like to see similar technology on U.S. vessels as well. 

“I would love to have the Navy produce more directed energy that can shoot down a drone, so I don’t have to use an expensive missile,” General Kurilla said. Instead of millions, the price tag for directed energy is, he noted, “a dollar or two a round.”

With these critiques in mind, Pentagon officials in August announced the Replicator Initiative. Conjuring up images of the Starship Enterprise, the program’s goal, they say, will be creating legions of inexpensive, small drones to be used essentially as “attritable autonomous systems,” to be reused at most a few times. 

This will not only fill a gap in America’s defenses, they add, but also create an incentive for American startups to challenge China’s current domination of the drone market. 

“Now if you’re a cynic – or just a realist – you’re thinking, ‘C’mon, Deputy! This is the Pentagon you’re talking about! You’re too slow!’” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said during the initiative’s rollout.

She sympathized with the critique, but this time, she assured her audience, “We are not taking our foot off the gas.” 

Vladimir Smirnov/Sputnik/KremlinPhoto/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (both right foreground) attend the official welcome ceremony in the Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea, June 19, 2024.

North Korea has exploited the Ukraine war to gain geopolitical leverage with Russia – forging a bold new alliance with President Vladimir Putin that poses security risks for Northeast Asia and the world.

Russia-North Korea relations have advanced rapidly following North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s trip to Russia last September, and since then Pyongyang has sent an estimated 11,000 containers of munitions to Russia, according to the U.S. State Department. During Mr. Putin’s visit last week to Pyongyang – his first in 24 years – the two leaders agreed to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Russia’s highest level of bilateral ties.

The centerpiece of the sweeping treaty is its mutual defense clause. It holds that if an armed invasion of North Korea puts the country in a “state of war,” Russia will be required to provide military assistance “with all means in its possession” to North Korea “without delay” – and vice versa. While the details of the treaty remain secret, that clause could effectively give North Korea shelter under Russia’s nuclear shield.

“This treaty has significant potential to endanger regional as well as global security,” says Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior fellow for the Korea Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “The treaty paves the way for Russia to become involved militarily in the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia if needed by locking in North Korea,” she says. “This provides North Korea with an extra nuclear cover against its perceived external threats, namely the United States, South Korea, and even China.”

Global reactions

In joining forces, Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim share the goals of breaking out of their pariah status, defying U.S.-led sanctions on their regimes, and promoting a multipolar world order, experts say. But the heightened cooperation by two actors widely viewed as unpredictable and disruptive could backfire.

The U.S., Japan, and South Korea issued a joint statement on Sunday strongly condemning the deepening military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow, and pledging to counter the threat from North Korea. In reaction to the treaty, South Korea has indicated it could consider providing weapons to Ukraine.

For the U.S. and its Asian allies, the pact heightens the risk that just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered decades of peace in Europe, a hot war could break out in Asia – especially amid rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, and in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. This, in turn, underscores the urgency of the significant strategy to bolster defense cooperation that is already underway between Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul.

For its part, China has remained publicly aloof from the upgraded ties between Russia and North Korea – Beijing’s two closest partners – seeing both pros and cons in the pact, experts say.

Sergei Bobylev/Sputnik/Kremlin/AP

Mr. Putin (second from left) and Chinese Vice President Han Zheng (second from right) visit the Russia-China Expo in Harbin, in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province, May 17, 2024.

On one hand, “the Chinese enjoy the fact that there will be more distraction of the United States,” says Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. Russia and North Korea are “not working together against China, they’re working together against the United States,” she says.

Yet China also worries that the optics of a trilateral alignment with Russia and North Korea will limit its room to maneuver. “This image of a Northeast Asia ‘axis of evil’ that I think both North Korea and Russia have tried to project … that’s something the Chinese have tried very hard to avoid,” says Ms. Sun. “That would eliminate China’s space to work and cooperate with Europe and also with Japan and South Korea.”

Finally, by drawing closer, Moscow and Pyongyang gain a degree of new leverage with Beijing. “China has had almost an entire monopoly of influence over both Russia and North Korea. So naturally, China would prefer not to lose that monopoly,” says Ms. Sun.

Nevertheless, Beijing’s official position is that Russia and North Korea can conduct their relationship as they see fit – and the two junior partners are forging ahead.

“Russia sees North Korea as very important because it has provided … millions of rounds of munitions” for Russian forces in Ukraine, says Ian Storey, senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and an expert in Asian security. 

By clinching a new strategic partnership with Mr. Putin, Mr. Kim opens the door to significant military, technology, and economic benefits for Pyongyang. It illustrates how Mr. Kim has profited from Russia’s battlefield shortages in Ukraine to dramatically boost his bargaining position with Moscow – a coup for his isolated dictatorship.

But North Korea wasn’t Mr. Putin’s only stop in Asia. 

Putin seeks friends in Asia

Vietnam’s Communist Party-led regime, which benefited from extensive support from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, welcomed Mr. Putin warmly last week. “Russia is still seen as an old friend” by Hanoi, says Dr. Storey, a specialist in Russian defense ties in Southeast Asia. Vietnam remains dependent on Russia for military equipment, he adds, as most of its military hardware is Russian-made.

Manan Vatsyayana/AP

Mr. Putin (left) and Vietnamese President To Lam take part in an event attended by the Vietnam Friendship Association and generations of Vietnamese alumni that studied in Russia, at the Hanoi Opera House in Hanoi, Vietnam, June 20, 2024.

Yet while Hanoi seeks to cooperate with Moscow on energy, trade, and defense, it is unlikely to offer military support for Russia in Ukraine, Dr. Storey says. That could jeopardize Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy,” which seeks to balance its ties with Russia, China, and the U.S. “If Vietnamese-manufactured shells start ending up in Ukraine, the Americans and the Europeans would be very angry,” and they are Vietnam’s largest trading partners, he says.

In contrast, experts say the Russia-North Korea treaty seems intended to give legitimacy to North Korea’s provision of weapons to help Russia fight the war in Ukraine. It also paves the way for Russia to provide technology for North Korea’s space and nuclear energy programs, which could help advance Pyongyang’s weapons programs.

“We do not rule out supplying weapons to other countries, including the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Mr. Putin said last week, according to Russian state-owned media.

“North Korea can produce masses of cheap artillery shells, drones, and battlefield missiles. That’s what Russia needs right now,” says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin advisor. In turn, “North Korea wants technical assistance in missiles and satellite technology. Russia could provide this, but the problem is [U.N. Security Council] sanctions. We do not know at this point whether Putin has decided to continue obeying the sanctions, or to violate them openly, or do it secretly.”

Russia’s willingness to provide technical support to upgrade North Korean military capabilities will “be a function of Russia’s need of North Korean munitions in turn,” says Ankit Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Few tools exist for the U.S. and its allies to block such cooperation between Russia and North Korea, which share a land border and adjacent territorial waters. “They can freely conduct transfers of any kind – economic transfers, military transfers – as they see fit. Sanctions are going to be limited in dissuading cooperation,” he says. “Russia and North Korea are largely … beyond giving any care to reputational concerns internationally.” 

Faster and faster, the drums beat, the cymbals clang, the women chant.

Feverishly, the visitors to this Islamic shrine wave their arms, gyrate their hips, whip their heads, and tap their feet – letting loose, letting free, as if no one in the world is watching.

This is no dance festival. At Sayyida Manoubia, a Tunisian shrine commemorating a 13th-century scholar and saint of that name who was praised for her charity, visitors are encouraged to unpack their stresses, leave behind their worries, and wish their deepest wishes.

“Here we can share our secrets and be ourselves,” says longtime regular visitor Salwa Sayeda.

While other Sufi shrines across North Africa are frequented by groups of men chanting the names of God and praying, the scene at Sayyida Manoubia is almost exclusively an all-women affair.

Every Sunday thousands of women from across Tunisia walk through an hourglass-shaped wooden door into the shrine, tucked away on a side street near Razi Hospital in the Tunis suburb of Manouba.

Taylor Luck

A visitor scrolls on her phone as two children run through the hourglass-shaped entrance to the Sayyida Manoubia shrine, dedicated to one of the few female saints in Islam, in Manouba, Tunisia, June 9, 2024.

Upon entering, visitors are embraced by a festival of prayer and womanhood.

A band stationed in the corner of the courtyard keeps up the tempo, encouraging shrinegoers to sing for God and for each other. Outside, women sell nuts, candies, and water for worshippers who come to spend the entire afternoon or simply a few minutes to make a wish.

“Please help me, Sayyida Manoubia,” a visitor says as she steps into the shrine’s inner chamber, “and bless everyone.”

Sayyida Manoubia

At the turn of the 13th century, under the Hafsid dynasty that then ruled North Africa, Sayyida Manoubia was born Aicha al-Manoubi to a merchant family in a rural area outside Tunis.

A talented seamstress and wool-weaver, she became known for distributing wool clothes to disadvantaged people in her town.

She later came under the tutelage of Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, a prominent Islamic scholar and leading Sufi thinker, and became one of 40 disciples who spread his mystical Islamic teachings throughout North Africa.

Sayyida Manoubia was recognized as a saint, both for her charity work and for her religious studies, and is one of the few female saints in Islam.

The veneration of saints was once widespread in Islam but is now discouraged in large swaths of the Sunni world. In North Africa, where Sufism remains a strong current, such celebrations remain staples of daily life.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

On Sundays the Sayyida Manoubia shrine fills with visitors who come to make offerings and ask for blessings.

According to oral history, Sayyida Manoubia became so influential that the Hafsid rulers consulted her on matters of state, making use of her judgement and considerable influence to shape policy.

For feminists, a revolutionary

The shrine honoring Sayyida Manoubia was established at her childhood home centuries ago.

Today Sayyida Manoubia is a patron saint both to the devout and to Tunisian feminists who see her as a revolutionary who pursued higher education and religious authority at a time when such opportunities for women were restricted.

Devoted to good works, prayer, and the study of Islam, Sayyida Manoubia, it is said, refused dozens of offers of marriage, concerned that a domestic life would interfere with her charitable work and pursuit of heavenly truths. She died at the age of 76, never having married.

Which is why, perhaps oddly, her shrine is now a must-stop for Tunisian would-be, soon-to-be, and longtime brides.

On a Sunday in June, Thakra, age 25, who previously came to the shrine with a friend praying for a job, carefully lights a candle and places it in a tiny grotto in a wall above the spot where tradition holds that Sayyida Manoubia was born. (Thakra, like some others interviewed, gave only her first name.)

Her request? A fiancé.

“We all grew up knowing Sayyida Manoubia was a good person who helped people in need,” Thakra says as she walks past a wall scrawled with visitors’ prayers and wishes. “We come here to ask her to help us women in our times of need.”

She smiles, shyly. “I want a fiancé.”

Taylor Luck

A bride-to-be dances under a silk cloak emblazoned with the word "Allah," meaning God, as visitors cheer her on and the Sayyida Manoubia troupe plays music at a Sufi shrine in Manouba, Tunisia, June 9, 2024.

Thakra barely finishes her sentence when a clamoring wedding party, one of dozens that would come through that day, surges into the inner shrine, singing, clapping, and ululating.

A soon-to-be bride dances into a room that once housed Sayyida Manoubia’s tomb, where a volunteer places a small disc of henna dye into her right palm as a blessing. Dozens of her bridesmaids line up behind her for the same blessing.

Outside in the courtyard, Hibba, a Tunis resident, wraps herself in a silk shroud and spins and twirls as her bridal party and dozens of visitors cheer and clap.

“It is an amazing feeling to have all these strangers share in my joy. It’s a high,” says Hibba, planning to marry in one week. “This shrine is a chance for us women to cheer on one another and share in one another’s happiness.”

“And support one another in our times of sadness,” adds one of her friends.

Social club’s vibe

Even for the nonreligious, a visit to the Sayyida Manoubia shrine has become an important, and very vibrant, part of wedding celebrations, to bless brides for their new married life – with steady jobs, a house, children, and success.

Others come for psychological and social support, with a resident amateur therapist and healer on hand to provide advice and guidance to women facing struggles and “personal crises.”

With regulars mixing with wedding parties and women feeling down on their luck, the shrine has the relaxed vibes of a social club, a neighborhood watercooler, and group therapy.

Taylor Luck

A custodian places a disc of henna dye – a blessing and a mark of good luck – into the palm of a visitor at the tomb of Sayyida Manoubia, in Manouba, Tunisia, June 9, 2024.

“I raised seven children at home,” says Ms. Sayeda, the veteran shrinegoer, who has come here weekly for 30 years and has watched people “grow up” at the shrine. “Anytime I feel stressed or that the world is getting too much, I hop into a taxi and head here.

“When I am sick, I come here for healing. When I am tired, I come here for rest. This place is complete serenity and relaxation. It puts me at ease and refreshes my soul.”

Charity

But it is not all dancing and healing at this Islamic shrine; generosity and charity are still very much present.

On this day, like every day, visitors carry containers and pots of couscous and chicken to feed disadvantaged Tunisians. Many of the neighborhood’s poorest residents come here for their daily meal.   

The shrine also offers free housing and food for out-of-town patients receiving treatment at the next-door government hospital, acting as a traveler’s rest house just as the shrine did when it was first established.

“Everyone talks about women’s rights today, but people’s veneration of Sayyida Manoubia is proof that there were women’s rights in the early days of Islam,” says Mohammed Salah Yaqoubi, the shrine’s caretaker, a role he inherited from his parents in 1987. “The good deeds that continue today show how influential women can be.”

“Here we have the freedom to unveil our true selves and commune with God,” Ms. Sayeda adds. “This is a place to remember that with God, and with each other, we women are never alone.” 

AP

Supporters of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group listen to a speech by leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, May 14.

For people as diverse and war-weary as those in Lebanon, words like dignity and peace have lately taken on real substance. An online campaign has picked up in recent days to prevent a full-scale conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in southern Lebanon. In particular, digital activists are sharing the hashtag #LebanonDoesn’tWantWar – especially a war like that in Gaza.

The campaign went into high gear last week after Hezbollah threatened Cyprus if the island nation assists Israel’s military. Yet the deeper message for Hezbollah is a reminder that the terrorist group, as it’s been designated by the United States, still remains a political party. In fact, it’s the largest party in parliament, in a country hungry to restore its stagnant democracy as well as basic services. Here’s a sampling of the online salvos that might restrain Hezbollah from escalating its attack against Israel:

“Do you value the blood of the Lebanese in your decisions regarding the war?” wrote Nancy Nessrine Lakiss, a Lebanese journalist. “Justice must begin with our country first!”

One online video shows a woman displaced from her home saying, “Do you want to liberate Jerusalem? You want to destroy Lebanon, displace its people, and kill them. ... [Just] let these people raise their children in a country in peace and security!”

The head of the An-Nahar newspaper, Nayla Tueni, warned Hezbollah not to allow Lebanon to continue being an arena for other countries to settle their scores: “All of them do not value the right of #peoples to their land, their country, their freedom, and their dignity.”

Hezbollah “does care about Lebanese public opinion, and that’s also the reason it hasn’t escalated to an all-out war,” Dan Naor, an expert on Lebanon at Israel’s Ariel University, told Israel Hayom. “It needs to maneuver between Iranian needs and Lebanese needs, and the Shiite community [in southern Lebanon] is paying the price.”

In recent weeks, Israel and Hezbollah have negotiated indirectly through countries like France and the United States to avoid a larger war. Yet the real peacemakers may be the Lebanese. Their online activism is a reminder that even despots seek legitimacy among the people. In Lebanon, legitimacy requires respecting people’s demand for a life of peace and dignity.