I live in the New Confederacy. It’s nowhere near the Old Confederacy but rather in rural western New York about forty miles from the city of Rochester. I’m a college professor, the kind that corrupts young people into thinking for themselves and subverting every opinion including their own. It’s a quiet life out here in the...
Continue readingAmerican Exceptionalism Once Again
The last week before Labor Day and summer closes with a bang. Literally, but in the old sense of the word. Neither something strange nor anything new happened today. How much less exceptional? And while we’re talking about things unremarkable, like how being offended is a necessary feature of the perils of learning in college (Duke University) along...
Continue readingIt is no small matter to advance the courage of one’s convictions, especially if your values and actions fail to identify with majority culture or, in this Age of the Meme, those who manage the discourse. Whose story gets told is not an equal opportunity promise. The fiction of unity often holds us together...
Continue readingAs We Celebrate Marriage Legality
To choose with whom we will forge a life in intimacy, with all its imperfect implications, is a remarkable human gift and, as we have learned, it is indeed not a blessing conferred by God but rather by social contract. The Justices in dissent of the majority Supreme Court ruling have been able to...
Continue readingOur Complicated Lives
As Thomas Jefferson made clear the Constitution’s First Amendment intended to build “a wall of separation between church and state.” Do note how Jefferson maintains it is possible to live in such a world: Citing the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, he writes to the Danbury Baptists: Believing with you that religion is...
Continue readingHope in the Age of Obama
Today America reacted again to redeem itself through sacraments of political exigency. I watched unamazed as the Governor of South Carolina, followed by a series of would-be Republican Presidential nominees each pursue their absolution and provide the required rhetoric. As Governor Haley surrounded herself with those appealing to hope to confer upon her newfound...
Continue reading