I started college as a philosophy major. While my friends were agonizing their way through calculus and organic chemistry, I was happily holed up in the library stacks with musty volumes by Nietzsche, Socrates, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, et. al., or in the Student Union having deep conversations ... Continue reading
Confessing our national guilt
May 26, 2009 By
May 26 is National Sorry Day in Australia, a national attempt to heal the wounds of the century-long practice of forcibly removing mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers. This government policy, which was carried out for about 100 years from 1860 to modern times, is known to have ... Continue reading
The specter of change
April 29, 2009 By 2 Comments
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. — Thomas à Kempis Too often, it seems the things we wish we could change we cannot, while the things we wish would stay as they are, change. The world is in flux and we're changing ... Continue reading
A game-changing breakthrough in stem cells
April 23, 2009 By 2 Comments
It's like finding a way to turn water into gasoline, or recycled paper into gold.Under the headline Major Breakthrough in Generating Safer, Therapeutic Stem Cells from Adult Cells, Science Daily reports that researchers at Scripps Research Institution have perfected a technique for transforming ... Continue reading
The politics of beauty
April 22, 2009 By
My interest in beauty pageants probably peaked when I was 15. These days, the closest I get is laughing at Sandra Bullock's send-up of beauty contests (scholarship programs!) in Miss Congeniality.But I have been fascinated by the controversy over this weekend's Miss USA pageant, caused when ... Continue reading
One small breath for mankind
April 19, 2009 By
With the Obama administration's brave decision to classify carbon dioxide (CO2) as a hazardous pollutant, environmentalists everywhere are troubled and wondering, how can we clean up our very own, air-fouling breath?What? No one ever told you that your body belches out CO2? It's true! The ... Continue reading
Redeeming America
March 20, 2009 By 1 Comment
Today's liberalism may stand on decades of failed ideas, but it is failure in the name of American redemption. [Liberalism's power is that]... it addresses America's moral accountability to its past with moral activism. ... Liberalism's glamour follows from its promise of a new American innocence. ... Continue reading
William Saletan on the stem cell debate
March 11, 2009 By 2 Comments
Slate Magazine's William Saletan made an apt and useful comparison between the debate about embryonic stem cell research and the use of water boarding in CIA interrogations: "On Monday, President Obama lifted the ban on federal funding of stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. If you ... Continue reading
