Free Republic

Dr. Thomas Sowell has been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century. On June 30, he will have completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight some important features of that life. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As part of the Great Migration northward during the 1930s and '40s, he and his family moved to Harlem, New York. Sowell attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School but dropped out. In 1951, he was drafted into the military and assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps, where he became a photographer....

In last year’s roundup of the top stories of the year, I argued that 2014 was the year we were all drafted into the culture wars. “This is the year when we were served noticed that we won’t be allowed to stand on the sidelines, because we will not be allowed to think differently from the left.” The signature story of the year was the comet shirt guy, a mild-mannered scientist caught wearing the wrong shirt on television. That case served notice that “To be targeted by accusations of misogyny, you don’t have to be a beer-chugging ‘bro’ who spends...

When a witness for the prosecution provides the testimony that affirms the innocence of the defendant—when a witness is turned—there can be no more dramatic and powerful exoneration for the accused. And amongst the many gifts that David Limbaugh brings to bring to his latest best-selling book, Jesus on Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel, it is Limbaugh’s gift of disbelief, his prior agnosticism toward “the God of the Bible,” that provides the gripping testimony necessary to turn an ordinary apologetics book into an extraordinary defense of, not just the Bible, but of belief in general. What...

Father Edward T. Oakes, S.J., professor of dogmatic theology at Mundelein Seminary and University of St. Mary of the Lake, has gone to God, dying on December 6, 2013. Readers of First Things know Fr. Oakes well. Over the course of two decades he has been intimately linked with the journal, publishing essay after essay on subjects that extended from Shakespeare to original sin, from the latest movie, to the nature of evolution. Oakes wrote well on many themes, but he will surely be remembered as one of the earliest and most insightful interpreters of the extraordinary thinker, Hans Urs...

In his recent blog post, M. J. Mollenhour explores the concept of the United States as a fortress being invaded by Middle Eastern jihadists. He pictures the Left in America as undermining the walls of the fortress, thus enabling the invaders. What does this have to do with gun rights in Knoxville? As Mollenhour so aptly puts it in the post: * "The gun stands as a repugnant symbol of man’s stubborn insistence that he is equal with other men (because all are sinful in the sight of God). * The gun in the hands of the citizen is a...

© 2010 Publishers Development Corporation My column "The Perfect Storm," dealing with Hillary Clinton's reversal of U.S. policy to accept the UN's Arms Trade Treaty, appears in the March issue of GUNS Magazine, now on sale at news stands and also online. Every month, the magazine posts its current issue in digital form, accessible by clicking on the flash icon in the upper-right section of their home page. For those of you on dial-up or with older computers, you can still read my current column and many of the other features via traditional html web pages by scrolling down and...

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as an indictment of nineteenth century industrialization and economic social classes. The following is a modern take on the tale exploring a different issue. Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in! “All of the Bill of Rights shall be sacred to me and I will defend every free man’s right to keep and bear arms!” Scrooge repeated as he scrambled out of bed. “Oh, Jacob Marley! Heaven be...

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a...

COLUMN Character AssassinationHollywood Kills Off the Movie HeroInterview with Barbara Nicolosiby Bobby Maddex In Salvo 7, we asked our resident film critic Barbara Nicolosi about the essential elements of good storytelling, as well as the egregious manner in which contemporary filmmakers tell their stories. What we didn’t get to discuss was the importance of character. Specifically, we failed to explore the concept of the hero and speculate on why the franchise hero has all but disappeared from Hollywood. Can you start by identifying the qualities of a hero? What attributes must a hero possess? I’m going to defer to Aristotle...

One evening in 2006, at a colleague's house, I met a friend of her teenage daughter. He was intellectually curious, and obviously bright - but implacably loyal to his parents' born again Christian faith. We spent pretty much the whole evening arguing with the poor boy, appealing to his logic and reason - all to no effect. There must, we despaired, be some seminal atheist text we could refer him to. We just couldn't think of one. But lo - ask, and ye shall receive. Not a month later, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a scorching manifesto for secularism....

A Supreme Property Rights Disaster In The Making More Kelo on the SCOTUS horizon?... [James S. Burling] 8/15/05 After a term marked by the Supreme Court’s utter contempt for property rights, those of us who happen to think there is something special about allowing old widows to keep their homes were not prepared for an even more bitter defeat. Yet, that is what President Bush handed us with the nomination of John Roberts. The battle over property rights is not a conservative versus liberal thing. It’s more a struggle between those who believe in the power of the state to...

HUMAN BEINGS TAKE A NATURAL DELIGHT IN FORM and pattern. Our eyes and visual cortex are designed to pick out shapes and hints of half-hidden presences, and to recognize the colors, textures, and fine details of natural objects. These are the necessary skills of a hunter-gatherer species, adapted to follow the obscure tracks of fleeing prey, to resolve the outline of a camouflaged animal in hiding, to remember and find again a nutritious berry, root, or herb. Nature rewards the exercise of such skills, which require concentration and work, with a pleasure that modern birdwatchers, naturalists, and scuba divers know...

I’d love to have a talk about the current situation in the Ukraine with my left-wing friends, but I don’t think they would be interested, and probably not even capable of an intelligent discussion. Not only is the Ukraine so far off and seemingly unimportant to them, the intricacies of its politics defy the usual “left” vs. “right” stereotypes. I truly believe that many long-time lefties pine for the days of the Soviet Union. It gave them a glimmer of hope for world-wide socialism in their otherwise very comfortable, cushy, American lives. Too much guilt about living in the midst...

Public release date: 26-Oct-2004 [ Print This Article | Close This Window ] Contact: Steve Koppes skoppes@uchicago.edu 773-702-8366 University of Chicago Scientists zero in on why time flows in one direction The big bang could be a normal event in the natural evolution of the universe that will happen repeatedly over incredibly vast time scales as the universe expands, empties out and cools off, according to two University of Chicago physicists. "We like to say that the big bang is nothing special in the history of our universe," said Sean Carroll, an Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of...

KIRTLAND, OH — Lakeland Community College near Cleveland, Ohio, has removed a professor of moral philosophy from his classes as punishment for refusing to hide his religious identity from students. The college threatened Dr. James Tuttle, who espouses traditional Catholic beliefs, with dismissal because he made statements on his syllabi and in class that disclosed his religious faith and how that shaped his personal philosophy. "Asking a philosophy professor to divorce his deepest philosophic views from his teaching is both outrageous and absurd," said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education...

Through a Glass, Darkly Michael Ruse A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love. Richard Dawkins. viii + 263 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 2003. $24. Richard Dawkins once called me a "creep." He did so very publicly but meant no personal offense, and I took none: We were, and still are, friends. The cause of his ire—his anguish, even—was that, in the course of a public discussion, I was defending a position I did not truly hold. We philosophers are always doing this; it's a version of the reductio ad absurdum argument. We do so partly to stimulate...

Cain's world: A Just and Libertarian war... by Greg Swann I am amused but not angered by the 'anti-war' protests, clothed and otherwise, that have polluted the news of late. If ignorant people want to promote barbarism in blind ignorance, this is their perfect right as ignorant Americans. The amusing part is that the war on Islam will be fought anyway, and the protests are about as important as the yipping and scrapping of puppies trying to scale the walls of a cardboard box. Aren't they just so cute?! I am annoyed, however, with the Libertarians who have arrayed themselves against...

  A recent Gallup Poll showed 38 percent of Americans believe that ghosts or spirits can come back and communicate with the living. (NASA)   Seeking Meaning Beyond Can People Send Signals After They Die? Psychologist Claims Science Has the Answer By Amanda Onion June 18 — The first time Denise E. Esposito knew her late husband was watching over her was the night of Sept. 11 — hours after he died in the World Trade Center attacks. "I was hysterical crying, so I went outside and there must have been a million stars up there — I've never...

I think it is Montaigne who has said, that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. I am sure it is true as to everything political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character. - Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edmund Randolph, February 3, 1794. ABILITY Man is capable of all things. - Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Bk II.12, 1588. ACHIEVEMENTOur soul cannot from her own seat reach so high; ‘tis necessary she must leave it, raise herself up, and, taking the bridle in her teeth, transport her man so far that...