Criminalize Actions, Not Words
"Offense, Rose argues, is the price of living in a free society."
An excellent profile on Flemming Rose, the Danish cartoonist who gained notoriety by publishing a series of satirical cartoons featuring various aspects of Islam, is featured in The Atlantic. For anyone concerned with the curtailing of speech in our time, it is very much worth reading. “One of the things that I’m worried about is the erosion of the distinction between words and deeds and how this opens the wa
BOOK BLOG | The Other Six Deadly Sins: Lust (Sayers - Letter 8)
LUST (luxuria), writes Sayers, is a sin which should be known by its own name. She finds that people tend to speak of “immorality” or the “immoral person” as being the lustful person – the sexually impure. Lust is certainly a sin, but it is hardly the only one, and probably not greatest. So let’s keep the names of our sins straight, shall we? The opposite of lust, of sexual sin, would presumably be the proper exercise of sex in a marriage defined biblically, and confirmed sac
Art Criminals (not) Cowering in Fear of Police Investigation
It was by reported by Discovery News this week that the Netherlands has suffered its biggest theft in two decades, a heist which made off with seven really important and valuable works. How valuable? Millions and millions and millions of dollars valuable. Just one of these paintings could easily fetch 60, 80, even 100 million dollars from the right collector on the black market. Note to police: I am definitely not in this income bracket, so please look elsewhere. Considering
Living & Teaching in the Era of Standards
There is a lot of hype – good and bad – about the standards movement in education. Like most political rhetoric today, I tend to think that much of this hype lacks substance. Teachers have been using standards for a long, long time. In the 1950's, textbooks were already printing "objective statements" in the margins. Today's standards are little more than codified objective statements. In this sense, I don't see much to get excited about one way or the other. I actually think
