It is wrong to ask someone intrusive questions about his private life. A federal appeals court made that clear in allowing a woman to sue over invasive questions by federal officials. It ruled that she had a plausible claim that federal officials violated her constitutional privacy rights by questioning her about private details of her
READ MOREReligion is a vital source for change, but it does not yield easily to what the political philosopher John Rawls in 1997 called the ‘public reason’ that enables liberal democracies. In the late 1960s, for example, a new group of radicals, known as liberation theologians, challenged the accommodation of religion to an unjust society. The
READ MOREThe best way to grasp how sociology has managed to make color-blind racism (CBR) seem believable is to study its Newspeak (to continue the Orwell theme). Whiteness To many modern sociologists, color blindness is a racist weapon that works, somehow, through whiteness, a scheme of thought invisible to most whites, but revealed by CBR sociology. Whiteness
READ MOREU.S. Special counsel Robert Mueller on Feb. 16 indicted Russian individuals and entities for interference in the U.S. presidential election. This is not a one-off act of Russian interference. In the previous nine years, Russia has invaded its neighbor Georgia, annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea and supported rebels in Eastern Ukraine. As a historian
READ MOREIn July, the mayor of San Francisco frankly stated that poverty in the city is so bad, that “there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen.” And it’s not just her – the local NBC investigative unit found a “dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces throughout downtown San Francisco.” While
READ MOREThe NBC show Friday Night Lights is about high school football in a small Texas community. High-school students are taking part in a class discussion when the brash star halfback, Brian “Smash” Williams crudely argues that monogamy is unnatural for a male. The teacher is puzzled by Smash’s statement. A female friend and classmate, Waverly,
READ MOREI’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Even after I’d earned my Ph.D. degree, my dad used to look at me with a twinkle in his eye and tell me, “Son, the trouble with you is that you don’t know nothing.” And he was right in regard to knowing worthwhile, practical things and having
READ MORENo one could rightly accuse C.S. Lewis, who was raised as a Northern Protestant Irishman, of betraying his adopted home of England. During the Great War, Lewis had—though exempt from any draft—volunteered to serve as an officer in the British Army. When he arrived in the trenches of that horrendous war, now a century gone
READ MOREGood friendships seem worth celebrating. But for many of us, tensions can appear from time to time between being a good friend and doing “the right thing.” When faced with, for example, a situation where it’s tempting to lie to cover for a friend, it can seem as though friendship and morality are on a
READ MORE