Category: Indiana Writers Group

by Ryan Cummins The city of Terre Haute has been informed by the State Board of Accounts that as a result of the most recent audit “there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.” With a private business, such an audit would indicate the business must either liquidate or substantially…

by Andrea Neal Long before scientists understood the benefits of wetlands, Hoosiers drained a wildlife Garden of Eden that stretched from western St. Joseph County to the Illinois line. The Grand Kankakee Marsh was “one of the great freshwater wetland ecosystems of the world,” according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Nicknamed the Everglades…

GEORGE WILL has been evolving over the past 40 years as a public intellectual and pundit. The fellow who wrote this column bears no resemblance to the author of the 1983 conservative best seller, “Statecraft as Soulcraft.” In the preface to that book, Will wrote: “I am often asked: ‘Why do you call yourself a conservative…

TRYING HARD to take the advice of our friend Tom Huston to prevent our crank from becoming a crackpot, we begin with a bright spot in this oh-too-fleeting season. An Indiana homemaker wrote Aunt Millie’s Bakery to thank the consummate family-owned Hoosier company for its special Christmas packaging showing a young girl in prayer. An…

by Craig Ladwig The fellow at the next desk loved to tell about his first assignment in a little river town founded as the disembarkation point for prostitutes, gamblers and pickpockets kicked off the steamboats. The town still had an edge, he said. Some of us prefer cities founded along ports and rivers, cities with…

BACK WHEN WE BABY BOOMERS came of credit-card age, the trigger word was “new.” It was everywhere in advertising promotions carried by the then-novel medium of television. It came to signal products that were overpriced or of lower quality — pigs in pokes, products that couldn’t withstand close inspection. So it is today with “must”…

By Donna Volmerding “For the poor you have with you always, but you do not always have Me.” — Jesus Christ In a letter to a local newspaper, a pastor wrote that “if we are authentic Christians, we are always on the side of the poor, the marginalized, the least, the last and the lost.”…

Dear Editor: At risk of dampening the boosterism generated by the multi-million dollar Regional Cities hoopla, we offer this counter proposal written by our adjunct scholar Fred McCarthy in 1989 and published in the fall 2011 issue of The Indiana Policy Review: “The State of Indiana announces a new policy for business development. In the…

THE CONCERN that a shift in the form of media ownership would change the nature of Indiana’s public discussion is realized in the Indianapolis Star. The newspaper, since its purchase by a widely held national corporation, has gone from a trusted statewide arbiter of that discussion to a myopic collection of digital headlines lecturing Hoosiers…

by John Pickerill Some claim that the Constitutional system (the Electoral College) for selecting the President. It was never the intent of the Constitution, however, for the President to be elected by direct popular vote — and for good reason. Part of their confusion is due to today’s state law code and how it circumvents…