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Reintegrating the Humanities 0
- May 5, 2016
I have always sought to instill into my students that a knowledge of literature is not possible without an adequate knowledge of history, philosophy and theology. I stress, for instance, that we cannot know the plays of Shakespeare unless we know something about the time and culture in which he was living and the philosophical
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The Actual ‘Sword in the Stone’?0
- History
- May 5, 2016
Even if you haven’t actually read a version of the legend of King Arthur, you’ve probably seen one of the movies or TV miniseries about it. I well remember the least serious: the 1963 animated Disney classic The Sword in the Stone, which many children from then on have also seen. We just don’t have
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Why are Colleges Banning ‘Any Product that Looks like a Cigarette’0
- Culture
- May 5, 2016
In this age of campus speech codes and safe spaces, are we really surprised that some university administrators act as moralistic tyrants over their student fiefdoms? The movement for a tobacco-free campus is no different. University officials around the United States are waging a war on the evil smoking “culture.” Consider the anti-tobacco policy of
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Ben Franklin on the Value of Rational Debate 0
- Culture
- May 5, 2016
When students in a maximum security prison education program beat out West Point cadets in a debate competition a while back, the story made headlines because of its almost man-bites-dog nature. West Point debate coach Adam Scher recently responded to the phenomenon in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. As Scher implies, debate competitions
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12 Times Calvin and Hobbes Taught Us about Philosophy & Religion 0
- Entertainment
- May 5, 2016
As you may know, Calvin & Hobbes contains religious and philosophical significance in its very title. In a nod to his political science classes in college, creator Bill Watterson named Calvin after John Calvin, the 16th-century theologian and reformer, and Hobbes after the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Here are 12 times that philosophy and religion spilled
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3 ‘Bad Loves’: When Freud and Christian Theology Actually Agree 0
- Culture
- May 5, 2016
Love is perhaps the greatest emotion humans can feel. It’s generally viewed as a positive concept, but philosophers, literature, and psychologists have long attempted to show that love of the wrong things in the wrong ways is a great vice. The philosopher Mortimer Adler, in his book The Great Ideas, identified three types of “bad
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