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What do you love? Neil Postman says students enter school as question marks and graduate as periods. This means America’s 1.3 million graduating college seniors are lightweights when it comes to raising the weightiest question as they look for work. They’re not alone. Human resource directors also overlook it. Engaged couples rarely resolve this question…
Teeth kicked in. “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” Al Gore poses this central question in his new book Assault on Reason, released this week. “Faith in the power of reason – the belief that free citizens can govern themselves…
Post-it Notes don’t work as well as most folks imagine.
Sanctuary seekers In 2005, Emily Brooker was hauled before a Missouri State University faculty panel on a charge of discriminating against homosexuals.1 An evangelical Christian, Brooker refused to sign a letter that one of her professors required, urging state legislators to support adoptions by same-sex couples. This incident reflects a burgeoning bias against evangelicals at…
Take and eat. Kissing ought to be more than swapping spit and sex more than exchanging bodily fluids. Similarly, food and eating ought to be about more than stuffing our faces. Like what? According to the Judeo-Christian faith, the phrase take and eat provides a hint. It describes food and eating as pointing toward something….
Stuffed. Engineering firms report increasing difficulty designing airtight respirators to protect American factory workers and firefighters. The culprit? The changing shape of our faces. While 60% of Americans are overweight and 30% are obese, 87% of all firefighters, 73% of American healthcare workers and 91% of those in law enforcement are overweight or obese.1 What’s…
Worldview and way of life. Today is the anniversary of the Columbine Massacre of 1999. Now the Virginia Tech slaughter dwarfs it as the worst massacre in U.S. history. Today also marks the anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1899. Hitler, Columbine and Virginia Tech share a common ancestor – Friedrich Nietzsche. But…
Wobbly waifs. This past fall, the Madrid fashion show banned overly thin models, saying unnatural thinness sends a terrible message. Organizers said models had to be within a healthy weight range. This image of waiflike women wobbling down runways is one way to better understand Islamist rage against America. Muslim fury is not against thin…
For years, the haunting specter of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster disturbed readers’ sleep and terrorized moviegoers. Then director Mel Brooks and actor Peter Boyle turned him into a lovable yet clumsy klutz in Young Frankenstein. I’m not sure that Mary Shelley would have been entirely pleased. She wasn’t writing comedy. Shelley was instead imagining whether a…
Is Abstinence Impossible?
Michael Metzger
June 11, 2007
A pointless exercise? The ongoing debate about the efficacy of abstinence-education programs underscores one point: we love sex. Duh. It’s important to remember this intense pleasure as we read yet another study – conducted by the Mathematica Policy Research Institute – reporting that abstinence-education programs do not delay the age when teens first have sex….