The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey (where I work) is now accepting applications for seven summer seminars, on topics ranging across ethics, politics, law, medicine, religion, and metaphysics, for every age cohort from high school students to young college faculty. Brief descriptions . . . . Continue Reading »
Next autumn will mark forty years since I arrived on a college campus as a freshman. I’ve never left the academy since then. I have been student or teacher at many types of institutions: the small liberal-arts college, the “Research I” state university that completely dominates a small town, . . . . Continue Reading »
Last year I posted in this space a reading plan of my own devising for working through all of Shakespeare's works. I made some work for myself when I created this plan, because I settled on reading plays Monday through Friday, and sonnets and other poems on weekends. Thus it needs annual . . . . Continue Reading »
When directly asked by Mormon friends and family members (yep, I’ve got LDS folks in my family), I have been privately critical of the LDS church’s support of the Utah legislature’s “compromise” on “discrimination” and religious freedom last spring. I think the church, from a position . . . . Continue Reading »
It is an unavoidable preoccupation of our political class to speak and write obsessively about the political impact of, well, everything. Pope Francis’s visit to the United States is a Very Big Thing to talk about in this respect. Whom will he afflict, and whom will he comfort? Will the Left chafe . . . . Continue Reading »
Recent revelations that Planned Parenthood is trafficking in human organs—obtained from unborn children killed in the organization’s abortion clinics—have prompted a righteous outrage from many commentators. Anyone with a shred of decency is appalled at the barbarity for which Planned . . . . Continue Reading »
Those of us who know Ryan Anderson have certain adjectives that come naturally to mind when we think of the country's most visible and effective under-40 defender of the truth about marriage. (And if I thought about it, I might drop the “under-40” qualifier.) Fearless, composed, tenacious, . . . . Continue Reading »
First tale: A tenured sociologist at a prominent research university, with a couple of books under his belt on related subjects, publishes the first-ever research, using a nationally representative sample, on the young-adult outcomes for kids raised by people who have same-sex romantic . . . . Continue Reading »
Decades ago when I was a graduate student, I found myself in one of those extended bull sessions of a kind to which grad students in political science are prone, with half a dozen people discussing everything from texts in political philosophy to current affairs.
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While Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone holds the line on the teaching of orthodox moral doctrines of the Catholic Church out in San Francisco, here in New Jersey a theology teacher in Immaculata High School in Somerville is threatened with dismissal from her position for . . . agreeing with orthodox moral doctrines of the Catholic Church. Continue Reading »
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