admin

Know Nothings 0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
There was a nineteenthth-century American political party known to history as the Know Nothings. Do today’s right-wing movements, some of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, warrant a comparison with that nineteenth-century political party? To do so, we must examine just what the Know Nothing, or American Nativist, Party, whose greatest influence
READ MORE
The Darkness Drops Again 0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
Those words come from William Butler Yeats 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” He wrote it immediately after the Great War—expected to be, hoped to be, by many, the last war. (So much for hope over realism.) He also wrote it just after the so-called Spanish flu had killed as many as 50 million worldwide and
READ MORE

Free Exercise or Free Entitlement?0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those 16 words encapsulate what many modern declarations of religious liberty attempt to guarantee by a plethora of verbiage. James Madison penned those clauses, and deliberated whether to use the term conscience, but after much debate he opted for
READ MORE
A Black and White Issue 0
- May/June 2021
- May 1, 2021
I was 15 years of age (growing up in White-ruled and racially segregated Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) when I read in Time magazine about the Bible Belt of the southern United States. I still recall my disbelief and puzzlement. How could the “Bible Belt” be the most Christian region in the United States and also be
READ MORE