The News has graciously given me a column dedicated to all things secular, scientific and humanist. The New Enlightenment is a grass-roots movement conceived to carry on and pick up where the “first” Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries left off. Wikipedia explains the original Enlightenment’s purpose was to “reform society using reason, challenge Read More
Wednesday marked the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Twelve years. It’s hard to believe that twelve years have come and gone since that awful day. I was in the fifth grade when the towers fell – and little did I know that here I would be, twelve years later, still living in Read More
Tuesday, there will be a series of events on campus to celebrate Constitution Day. Martin Battle, associate professor of political science and sociology, has put together an impressive program beginning at 9:30 a.m. on the third floor of the Curris Center and in Freed Curd Auditorium. Sessions will begin at 11 a.m and 2:30 p.m. Read More
It’s 8,000 cans. It’s baking cookies for someone who has lost a friend. It’s late nights in the Curris Center. It’s giving up what you want to do, what human nature tells you to do, and having the maturity to be vulnerable. It’s taking responsibility for your individual actions. It’s what Greek Life at Murray Read More
Monday, we took a momentary break from our hectic day- to-day lives of classes, jobs and whatnot to observe Labor Day, a holiday that, of course, supposedly celebrates work. The actual meaning of Labor Day has kind of fallen to the wayside, but that meaning is as potent and powerful as ever. Around the world, Read More
As we have just celebrated Labor Day with a day off from class and, hopefully, from work, let’s turn to Dorothy Sayers, an English graduate of Oxford University. This, of course, is no small feat for a woman reading modern languages and medieval literature in 1916 – a mystery novelist, translator of Dante, essayist and Read More
Would Martin Luther King Jr. have been invited to the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington? I’m not so sure the man honored Wednesday would be a guest of honor at his own march 50 years on. Why’s that, you ask? Well, Martin Luther King, Jr. probably would rather not share the podium Read More
By the time the next edition of The?News goes to print, history may yet have been made, as fast food workers walk out in a nationwide strike for higher wages and the right to form a union. This won’t be the first fast food strike (they’ve been going on intermittently since?November 2012) and it hopefully Read More