For many adults, the first and last time they willingly submit to living with a total stranger is their freshman year of college. And now is the time of year when many kids, just accepted into college, decide they won’t do it.
A comic strip I saw some years ago showed a little boy (it might have been Dennis the Menace) kneeling by the side of his bed, saying his nighttime prayers. With hands together in prayer position he said, “Please, God, grant me patience … now!”
Imagine for a moment you wake up one morning and discover that you are holding a club in your hand. If your first thought upon noticing the club is to ask yourself, “Who should I hurt with this weapon?” you might be a Republican member of the Idaho Legislature, or as we have seen just this week, a member of the United States Supreme Court.
Earth Day is an annual reminder of our connection to the planet. How we define that relationship depends on where we see our place in the universe. What is our responsibility for the Earth and how do we live it out?
What if the looming calamities of climate change, plastic pollution, the energy crisis and our whole environmental doom-scroll are symptoms of just one malady and it’s something we actually can fix?
Perhaps you can imagine punishments more to be feared than a lengthy prison sentence, but in a country that proscribes cruel and unusual punishment—except the death penalty—the only thing I can think of that would be worse than confinement in prison is confinement as the result of a crime that I did not commit. This is the situation in which Jennifer and James Crumbley find themselves. Last ...
