Several incidents have occurred recently at American colleges and universities that raise the question of where freedom of speech is headed today. Now let’s be clear. Not all speech is morally acceptable if we are serious about our Biblical commitments. Private Christian universities have good reason sometimes to create conditions for edifying and pure expression […]
Archives
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Speech: Its Value and Its Limits
29 Apr 2017
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Democracy: Is It Over-hyped? Or Overdone?
09 Mar 2017
I noticed a poll taken the other day in connection with Fox News (unfortunately I did not catch the purveyor of that poll, perhaps Fox itself). Whether the methodology was right or not, I don’t know but it found that 50% of people polled opposed the elimination of the Obamacare insurance mandate, while 48% supported […]
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The Examined Life–With Some Help
17 Feb 2017
Why do people still read Plato? Aristotle? The Bible? Augustine? Thomas Aquinas? John Locke? Immanuel Kant (well, maybe not so much)? What unifies them? It isn’t religion. Plato and Aristotle were most certainly not Christians. Augustine and Aquinas would have disagreed on the extent of man’s capacity to know and to will the good. The […]
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Immigration: A Partial Response
14 Feb 2017
My colleague Bert Wheeler wrote a recent piece on Bereans addressing more than one issue related to President Trump. The one that caught my attention was immigration policy. Bert expressed his concern (rightly) about Trump’s policies on that front. I assume from his use of the word “concerns” meant that he might or did have […]
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The Liberal Arts in the Christian Context
05 Feb 2017
Leland Ryken, Professor of English Emeritus at Wheaton College, has a fine track record of scholarship over a career that began in 1968. He has written thoughtfully about integration in his field, among other topics, but in particular I encourage you to focus on his well known essay entitled “The Student’s Calling.” In it he […]
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The City of Man
15 Jan 2017
I am sitting in the San Antonio airport, waiting for my flight back home, reflecting on an excellent Values and Capitalism retreat here and–the subject of this blog–my walk yesterday. My goal was to walk to a bookstore about two miles from my downtown hotel. I had mapped it out using Googlemaps and set out […]
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This blog is generally about current policies or issues in the news or that are still current to a degree in the realm of political economy, politics, and economics. I have been reading a really interesting book by Jonathan Wight, entitled Ethics in Economics: An Introduction to Moral Frameworks (Stanford University Press, 2015). Wight addresses […]
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Fake News: Hint, this blog is not fake news
07 Dec 2016
Well, it appears that at least some people have now found a new pet peeve, so-called “fake news,” to be useful in attacking news stories they don’t like. The term of course is new, but the fact is not new at all. Various media throughout the centuries have engaged in propagandistic writing in various forms, […]
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I have made some scattered comments in recent months in relation to this past election cycle and the candidates for president. I think I made it clear that neither was anywhere close to an ideal. Especially was this true for Christians looking honestly at each candidate. I am sure we can all point to severe […]
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The Real Battle
11 Oct 2016
The revelation about Donald Trump’s vulgar and pretty ugly statements about women has certainly generated heated discussion. I am not here to either defend his statements or to persuade anyone to vote for him. I will merely state the obvious: Christian voters find themselves in quite a quandary. On the one hand, I am convinced […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach