With the release of part one of the film version of The Lord of the Rings this week, newspapers and magazines have been filled with articles exploring every aspect of author J.R.R. Tolkien’s life and his world of Middle Earth. Well, nearly every aspect. While journalists are enthusiastically detailing everything from Tolkien’s passion for inventing new languages to his views Read More ›
Review of Bernard d’Abrera, The Concise Atlas of Butterflies of the World (London: Hill House, 2001), 353 pages. Bernard d’Abrera’s concise atlas of the world’s butterflies is a beautifully produced book with the most stunning photographs of butterflies that I’ve ever seen. Though not intended as a coffee-table book, it could eminently serve that purpose. D’Abrera himself is a world-renowned butterfly Read More ›
Imagine visiting your 85-year-old mother in the hospital after she has a debilitating stroke. You find out that, in order to survive, she requires a feeding tube and antibiotics to fight an infection. She once told you that no matter what happened, she wants to live. But the doctor refuses further life-sustaining treatment. When you ask why, you are told, Read More ›
As a culture, we increasingly believe government should protect us from dying from anything, yet we are all going to die. At the moment, despite our apparent successful efforts against the Taliban, many Americans fear being killed by a terrorist far more than they fear many things that are much more likely to kill them. Fortunately, during the past 50 Read More ›
WHEN OREGON VOTERS legalized assisted suicide in 1994, state regulators had a problem. They wanted to authorize doctors to prescribe barbiturates as killing agents. But the federal government regulates the use of these drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, and federal law did not permit their use to intentionally kill. Ordinarily, that would have been that. The feds, not the Read More ›
Deflation is upon us. Put another way, the U.S. economy is now experiencing a sustained reduction in the general level of prices. Last month, the Producer Price Index posted its biggest decline on record, 1.6%, and the Consumer Price Index fell by 0.3%. All of the major commodity price indices are down by 11% to 20% for the year. Many Read More ›
Approximately 600 people attended the “Celebrating Middle Earth: The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization” conference at SPU last Friday and Saturday. The conference was co-sponsored by the SPU Society of Fellows, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Discovery Institute and hosted by the C.S. Lewis Institute. Associate Professor of Political Science John West, who first Read More ›
The war on terrorism has absorbed our attention since September 11th. While this is appropriate, we should not forget that the long-simmering cultural wars continue. The other side is hard at work, chipping away patiently while all eyes are turned toward Afghanistan. The latest threat? Courtesy of PBS, the bonobos the “make love, not war” primates are coming Read More ›
When readers in England recently were asked to name “the greatest book of the century,” they chose J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Many critics were scandalized, finding it incomprehensible that the public could honor a work the literary community had largely dismissed as old-fashioned, didactic, and escapist. Yet the survey was far from a fluke. Tolkien’s writings have Read More ›