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  On April 3, our local newspaper, The Waterloo Region Record, carried a front-page feature about the travelling Anne Frank Exhibit, an international project of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The exhibit had recently arrived at Cameron Heights Collegiate high school in... Read More →

They came in baby carriages, strollers, and wheel chairs, but mostly they came on foot to the rallying point at Piazza della Repubblica, one of Rome’s largest squares. Despite an overcast sky and unseasonably chilly weather, thousands—more than in prior years—gathered in the late... Read More →

  The charm of the toy kaleidoscope from ancient childhood was seeing order come out of chaos. Holding the cylinder to our eye, we would give it a twist; then free-floating pieces, falling randomly, would be reflected by a series of mirrors, transforming randomness into... Read More →

  Every Thursday morning I have a little cross-cultural experience. The rituals of greeting—taking off my shoes before entering a home, warm exchanges, inquiring about one another’s families—come fairly naturally to me. More difficult is a solicitous style of text messaging, in... Read More →

  A curious path now leads us away from hell and punishment. It skirts nimbly heaven and reward, then ends in the ephemeral cloud of heaven on earth. Its achievements are stupefying. They are nothing less than a repudiation of the afterlife’s heaven and hell plus the... Read More →

  Abortion remains at the center of the pro-life movement, which began as a reaction against efforts to legalize the practice in one country after another across the Western world in the middle of the last century. Those efforts largely succeeded, in the United States and... Read More →

“Service animals” have been much in the news these past few years. During one recent summer, stories proliferated about problems on airplanes as passengers were bringing all manner of wildlife on board under the rubric of “emotional support.” Suddenly there were service pigs in... Read More →

  When I was a child, and the neighborhood pack of kids I ran with started squabbling about what to play or how to play it, sooner or later someone would end up yelling, “You can’t tell me what to do! It’s a free country!” Both the assertion and its justification are... Read More →

  Gutzon Borglum is not exactly a household name, though the quartet of faces he carved on Mt. Rushmore is familiar to virtually every American. His artistic achievement is probably the most spectacular of its kind ever produced. The lifelike busts of presidents Washington,... Read More →

  The just-adjourned session of the Virginia Legislature turned the Old Dominion into the latest battleground in an effort begun two years ago to force the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) into the federal Constitution. Although when proposed by Congress in 1972, ERA contained a... Read More →