Category: Indiana Writers Group

by Andrea Neal Once runaway slaves made it to the home of Levi and Catharine Coffin in eastern Indiana, they were safe. Truly safe. To the best of Levi Coffin’s knowledge, every slave who passed through his Underground Railroad station made his/her way to freedom. The Coffins lived in a mostly Quaker community called Newport,…

by Craig Ladwig “It’s anybody’s guess how Republicans are thinking about this (open immigration),” Barack Obama said in Los Angeles last week. “If they were thinking long-term politically, it is suicide for them not to do this.” I hate to drag my great-grandmother into this, but she would have a point to make: Being “American”…

by Bruce Ippel, M.D. This is about decisions. It starts with your decision to read it. What about the other decisions in your life? If you’re an adult with, say, a high-school education and not currently in the Army or prison, then you should be making about all of them yourself. Or not. You probably…

By Stephen M. King, Ph.D. Millennials, the age cohort between 18 and 29 who came of adult age around 2000 or so, are poised to impact the world around them. In some ways, they are scattered in their views, but in others they are consistently inconsistent. Still, this generation of nearly 60 million can and…

A FRIEND in the political science department at Taylor University argues that Indiana politicians have a spiritual problem, not a policy problem. Those of us in the policy-review business understandably have resisted this contention — until now. A weekend viewing of a classic Western parody brought me around. It was the scene in Blazing Saddles…

by Andrea Neal Today his poems are written off as the sentimental musings of a time gone by. During his life, James Whitcomb Riley ranked with Longfellow and Twain as a best-selling author, and his works were required reading in virtually every school. Many historians consider Riley our most famous Hoosier, not only for the…

by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. Indiana’s public intoxication law looks like it will be overturned. That seems to me entirely appropriate — if we haven’t confounded the problem. Prior to 2012, if one’s blood alcohol content was above the legal limit, one could be arrested almost anywhere in Indiana. I recall a number of unconfirmed anecdotes…

“Cronyism is the substitution of political influence for free markets. It comes about when government has a lot of power over private-sector decisions and when the government officials in power have great discretion over how to use it.” — David Henderson, editor of the Encyclopedia of Economics by Craig Ladwig It is the time of…

For the use of the membership only (556 words) “All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” — George Orwell FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER the foundation’s annual Veterans’ Day essay is being written in advance of Nov. 11. As is the formerly procrastinating…

By Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. Stories abound of school dropouts who consequently fail to establish themselves in jobs because of parental attempts to force youngsters onto a particular career path. Less noted are young people presenting in the offices of their undergraduate advisers with no interest in a particular major and indicating that all their…