On Memories as a Starting Point: A Review of “Encounters” by...
(An Eastern-European Reading). In a scene from a great movie called Transsiberian, a Russian traveler tells some innocent American tourists about the “Gulag” and...
Without Borders, Ltd.
Kearneysville, WV. Question: what do these two books have in common? A Garfield the Cat book and My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One...
Tocqueville on the Shores of Titicaca
Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time...
Philip Bess’s Pizza
Last week, Philip Bess - the noted Notre Dame University scholar of architecture - delivered a lecture in Washington under the auspice of the...
Can Health Care Be Local?
Wichita, KS
Over the past couple of weeks, I've written a few things on the current debate over health care reform. A couple of smart...
Advice For Up-And-Comers
Claremont, CA. I spoke last week at the New Jersey Governor’s School for Public Issues, a (mostly) state-funded summer program for civic-minded students about...
Hospitality and the Hopi: Fragmentation and Hope
“Pray for the foothills,/goatherds and windmills/and satellite dishes” – Mark Heard
Cincinnati, OH. A comment on my recent post on Hopi hospitality referred to “…satellite...
Cocktails at the Dump
My father in-law, Ron, tells me a story of what life was like when he moved his young family (my wife not yet born)...
Benedict on Business: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Irving, Texas. Since its beginnings with Aristotle and Plato, the study of economics has always been regarded as a branch of philosophy, a colony...
The Strange Lament of a Bohemian Conservative
“Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily...