It’s customary on St. Valentine’s Day to write odes, buy chocolates, and lavish romance upon the burning object of one’s affection. Approximately 140 million Valentine’s Day cards will be exchanged on the holiday, estimates suggest. But why do we do all these things? Most people, it’s safe to say, undertake these tasks without an inkling
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Christian life relies on faith, not on sight. But it is a serendipity when social science bears out its teachings about spiritual and religious freedom – and it is particularly delicious when those findings are featured on NPR. “The world’s wealthiest and most individualistic countries also happen to be some of the most altruistic,” wrote Georgetown University’s
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Many parents will feel a twinge of concern if their five-year-old can’t sleep without his dummy or their teenager refuses to throw out the tattered blanket she’s had since she was a baby. The topic of comfort objects is hotly debated, with some arguing that the attachment to objects from babyhood is childish, unnecessary or
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If G. K. Chesterton were around to account for what’s wrong with our world today, he’d likely list political correctness high among our current ills. The term itself would not have been familiar to him, but the phenomenon was. He detected in the atmosphere of his era a “cloudy political cowardice.” Instead of telling others
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On Feb. 14, sweethearts of all ages will exchange cards, flowers, candy, and more lavish gifts in the name of St. Valentine. But as a historian of Christianity, I can tell you that at the root of our modern holiday is a beautiful fiction. St. Valentine was no lover or patron of love. Valentine’s Day,
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The English writer George Orwell once observed that the “most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” This idea is working itself out in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts. A decision to pull two of the most influential novels in recent American history, To Kill
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