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Keeping the Faith

The more religiously committed parents are, the more they want their children to grow up believing and practicing the family’s religion. This is especially true of parents who are religiously traditionalist or conservative. The desire to pass on the faith to offspring in a world that does not seem . . . . Continue Reading »

Anti-Religious Education

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 »

Briefly Noted

Pepperdine professor Paul J. Contino is a well-known and well-regarded scholar and teacher of Christianity and literature, and he proves himself an engaging and insightful guide to The Brothers Karamazov with this new study. “I began work on this book over thirty years ago,” he notes. . . . . Continue Reading »

Regressive Ed

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 »

Style Reveals the Man

Writing cannot be taught, as I came to realize after attempting to teach it for thirty years to university students, but it can be learned. One can only teach the mistakes bad writers make and provide examples of what makes good writers good. One cannot teach a love of language, the power of . . . . Continue Reading »

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