Of Common Place

I do not know whether James Krenov was a religious man or not.  A cabinet maker born in Russia, raised in and around America, educated in Eu...

This reading from Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812 : To become proper soldiers, men needed to accept subordination to the orders ...

As it turns out, social morality is not the only field in which each person cannot be left merely to look out for themselves and an overarch...

Hayek has not read my book with the measure of 'good will' which an author is entitled to expect of a reader... Until he can do so,...

Redistribution of wealth is a phrase that is coded for use as a weapon in the American political war between right and left: use it favorab...

From The Case Against Perfection by Michael J. Sandel: Even among those who favor abortion rights, few advocate abortion simply because ...

From Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert: What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning ?  Both, of course, are intima...

One of the things that differentiates Christianity from a fringe cult is - or at least is supposed to be - that we submit to a rational-empi...

Another reading from The Anarchist's Tool Chest by Christopher Schwarz: We have become a culture that is obsessed with price more th...

In his very readable treatise on fine woodworking called The Anarchist's Tool Chest , Christopher Schwarz sets out on a mission to re-es...

There was once a Baptist camp & conference ground that was obsessed with proper, orderly parking.  Everywhere one looked there were sign...

Today's reading comes from Gene Heyman's Addiction: A Disorder of Choice . Given a series of choices, there is more than one way ...

A new study from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University demonstrated, among other things, that men who had a higher number of lifetime ...

Back in Regenerus & Uecker's Premarital Sex in America we learned that psychologists have identified the tendency of people to perc...

From The Birth of Plenty by William Bernstein: One of the strongest correlations with happiness is the perception that an individual has...

From Blind Spots by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel: ...Researchers found in one study that offering people an opportunity to wash the...

From Theodore Zeldin's Conversation . I don't think the answer is simply for them to explain what they feel, because so long as...

From Harry Frankfurter's On Bullshit : Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is ma...

From Eberhard Nestle's Introduction To The Textual Criticism Of The New Testament : "For the preparation of his Bible, Origen pr...

From George I. Mavrodes, "The Inspiration of Autographs," The Evangelical Quarterly 41.1 (Jan.-Mar. 1969): 19-29 . "Becaus...

From Premarital Sex in America by Mark Regenerus and Jeremy Uecker. I should not judge anyone's sexual conduct except my own... 83% ...

By the 17th century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students in such institutions as Ox...