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Anti-Religious Education

From the April 2021 Print Edition

I spent the first thirty years of my adult life fighting racial injustice in America. I was a community activist in Boston in the sixties, I spent time in jail in North Carolina in 1963, and I walked across that Selma bridge with Dr. King in 1965. I was the Massachusetts state official responsible . . . . Continue Reading »

Regressive Ed

From the December 2020 Print Edition

The academic achievement gap has been the subject of thousands of books and hundreds of thousands of articles during the past six decades. Do these persistent gaps arise from discrimination on the part of educational systems, or on the part of society in general? Or, do they arise from cultural . . . . Continue Reading »

My Excommunication

From the November 2019 Print Edition

In 1992, a group of dissident bishops of the American Episcopal Church held a meeting after that denomination’s triennial general convention—the notorious convention whose delegates had failed to agree upon a resolution calling for bishops and priests to be sexually continent outside of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Past in Full

From the March 2019 Print Edition

There’s a book I keep in the bathroom at home, a big blue volume of 750 pages titled, somewhat ironically, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes. A terrific book to browse in, with more than four thousand brief anecdotes about more than two thousand individuals from ancient times to the near . . . . Continue Reading »

Muslims in the Melting Pot

From the April 2016 Print Edition

Several related questions underpin much of the discussion about the growing presence of Muslim immigrants and their children in the United States. Will these immigrants and their children become loyal Americans? Will they instead emerge as a permanently disloyal opposition and a potential source of . . . . Continue Reading »

Faith-Based Resistance

From the December 2015 Print Edition

Last June, I was in Ukraine advising civil society groups that are seeking to ensure that the new Ukrainian education law promotes religious and educational freedom, including the rights of parents. Ukrainian policy-makers are eager to align their country with the West, so a number of times I . . . . Continue Reading »