February / March 2006
Searching for justice
Justice can turn up in the oddest places. I met it, most recently and unexpectedly, in an unfashionable adage connected with an ancient system of slavery.
Conservatives aren’t cookie cutters
In Nashville, Tennessee, at the beginning of February, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was again defying convention. With cold Northern winds whistling around the Corinthian columns of the Tennessee state capitol, hardly a block from the historic Hermitage Hotel where we lodged, fourteen of us undergraduates were busily engaged in debunking a common contemporary myth.
Walking through Diversity U
Once upon a time there was a small private college with a Great Books curriculum. The students read philosophers from Plato to Wittgenstein, literature from Greek epic to French novel, and theologians from North Africa to Geneva.
Note from the Editor
Society would like to blind its conscience and pretend a code of ethical behavior does not exist. However, even a three-year-old has the ability to decipher between good and bad actions. Through observation of my own siblings and the children I have babysat, I have been able to see this awareness of morality.
Lassoing lust
How was the West won? Hollywood’s Brokeback Mountain would have us think it was won by the lonely hearts of men who used their time on the range to lust for each other. Toby Keith—one of America’s greatest Western story-tellers—sings to a different tune:
Cartoons ignite controversy
Peace. We would all love to have it, or would we? Some claim to be for peace, holding their rainbow signs and spraying stop signs with the words “war” (how clever—destroy public property to convey they are not in favor of war and destruction), yet when their true colors shine, they are not quite as tranquil or beautiful as those of a rainbow.
