Category: Culture
The pines of Southwest Michigan
We’re between major holidays, and now that I’ve overshot my yearly quota for digesting pumpkin-flavored things — and regained the power to stand upright — it’s time for one of my favorite Christmas traditions: listening...
The Hardest Thing About Thankfulness
Think of someone important to you. Your wife or your mother or your professor. Maybe they’re important because of something they’ve done for you, or maybe it’s just because you like them. If you really...
Thirty Seconds in a Thousand Years
Eighty years after the fact, you’re lying on a worn mattress with now-thin pillows under your sun-freckled baldspot and your hand is propped higher than the rest of you. Why? Because it’s being held by...
“Listen First” — LGBT at a Christian college (and a high-five for my alma mater)
When most people think about Christian universities, they think of stingy, closed-off bubbles where the students are a homogenous mass, and homogenously crazy (the sort of crazy that the young and spiritual are often assumed to...
Everything ends?
If you woke up this morning and felt like something was different, you’re almost certainly right. Because everything ended in the night. History has ended. Reason has ended. Poverty has ended. Sex has ended. Apparently,...
What happened to repairing America’s image?
When Barack Obama took office in 2009, one of his foreign policy platforms was to repair America’s image abroad. Over the course of the last 5 years, however, the perception of the United States has taken...
Monsters and sheep
The world is home to monsters. Jekylls and Hydes. Normal by day, terrors by night. People who lose their morals, controllably at first, and soon uncontrollably, in daylight hours, no potion required. Only sometimes, the monsters...
5 reasons everyone should read The Onion
Most Americans with access to a computer have come across an article from The Onion at some point. It’s often funny, but it’s been particularly good of late — possibly even profound. Here are 5 reasons everyone...
On elitism, and why knowledge is good but thinking is better
This is the second part of a two-post series about the education, elitism and the question, “What are you doing with your degree?” Read Part I here. __________________________________________________________________ Knowledge is proven good by the goodness...
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake?
With school starting up again, I’ve been thinking about education. This is the first part of a two-post series about the education, elitism and the question, “What are you doing with your degree?” __________________________________________________________________ In...