Nineteen years ago, one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history happened at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Thirteen lives were lost, and 13 families were forever changed. Evan Todd was one of the lucky ones. The first to be shot in the library, he persuaded the shooters not to murder him. “After
READ MOREThe chickens have come home to roost at Duke’s Divinity School. Protesting students claim the school is insufficiently diverse. More needs to be done, they say, to combat racism, transphobia, homophobia, and associated evils. All this despite a campaign by the administration to achieve these very aims in the course of which a distinguished faculty
READ MOREYesterday (Sunday, April 22) was Earth Day 2018 and time for my annual Earth Day post….. In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey
READ MOREKenneth Clark’s “Civilisation” mini-series, produced by the BBC and aired on American public television in 1969, celebrated the Western art and culture it depicted and explained. The show was one of the most widely watched and re-aired shows of its kind at the time, and is still discussed today, almost fifty years after its television debut.
READ MOREI was reading George Will on Syria. The piece consists of this: Obligatory reference to the Germans dropping chemical weapons. Wikipedia level knowledge of the types of weapons and a strained causal link to Israel’s motivations in destroying Syrian airfield, completely oblivious of the greater strategic considerations. Mild Wikipedia level history to show that the
READ MOREEducation Secretary Betsy DeVos’ recent interview with Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” caused quite a bit of backlash from critics. As my colleague Jonathan Butcher has written, “60 Minutes” ignored many of the facts about the state of education in America. Response to the interview drew quite a bit of criticism of DeVos and her
READ MOREFollowing the release of the latest numbers from The Nation’s Report Card, City Journal columnist Ray Domanico made an interesting observation: the low math and reading scores of eighth grade students parallel the national rates of college completion. In other words, the students who will succeed in college are the ones who are currently succeeding
READ MOREIn 1990 Pope John Paul II, troubled over the decline of traditional religious views on Catholic campuses, published Ex Corde Ecclesiae, an apostolic constitution that aimed to define and reestablish the identity and mission of Catholic institutions of higher learning. Among the document’s many provisions was a call for Catholic universities to foster ”fidelity to
READ MOREImagine being born during the bloody Cultural Revolution in China and growing up in a country with little economic or personal freedom. Few Chinese citizens had the knowledge that human rights are not granted by government, and those few who knew could not say. Few knew that government is not the source of economic progress;
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