by Craig Ladwig “New York City’s city council is set to dilute a host of criminal laws including laws against public urination and excessive noise because council members believe too many members of minorities are getting arrested.” — the Jan. 24 Daily Caller The fictional hometown of the Canadian comedian Red Green is Possum Lake, Ontario. Green has a routine in which he claims that the town was founded by a fellow who was walking…

by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. This year will likely be remembered as the year of the populist revolt. Populism is a political philosophy that calls for the government to represent the interests of the ordinary person. Populist candidates typically argue that the current crop of political leaders are beholden to narrow elites at the expense of the common man. The populists of 2016 are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sander’s bête noire are billionaires who are…

by Andrea Neal In 1848, the Indiana Hospital for the Insane opened on the west side of Indianapolis, launching a new era in health care that would witness the most progressive innovations and the most heinous abuses. Historians credit a great social reformer, Dorothea Dix, with persuading Hoosier lawmakers to fund a mental hospital in order to provide more humane treatment to the most vulnerable citizens. When Dix began her campaign in the early 1840s,…

by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. It is common to support Trump — and among certain other people, it is common to have disdain for people who support Trump. A few thoughts from a two-time Libertarian congressional candidate who is more like Trump than you might have thought: First, recognize that your candidate is not all that impressive either, so you might want to avoid getting on a high horse. Aside from long-shot Rand Paul, all of…

by Craig Ladwig Imagine for a moment that you are not a baker of wedding cakes, a deliverer of pizzas, a lesbian, a gay, a bisexual or a transvestite. Imagine further that you don’t give a whit about restoring religious freedom or whatever, that your only concern is amorphous — just bringing more business to the state. That should greatly simplify your position on the various pieces of LGBT legislation bouncing around the Statehouse this…

by Fred McCarthy They say insanity is doing the same thing time after time and expecting different results. And citizen ignorance plus lethargy adds to the insanity by accepting rosy financial fantasies and outright lies. A recent front-page story in the Indianapolis Star, with artwork, is headed “A project expands.” It concerns, of course, another big real estate development on the near south side of — where else? — in downtown Indianapolis. The first phase…

Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. Awhile back, I read a review of Mark Noll’s “Every Tribe and Nation” in First Things magazine. It looked good, so I picked it up and was not disappointed. I first came across Noll with his provocative book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” Along with Os Guinness’s “Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About…

Whether you agree or disagree with these assertions, they tend to demarcate the Republican Party today: Current levels of immigration benefit the country. The U.S. should not restrict immigration by persons from predominately Muslim countries. Persons in the country illegally should be accorded a path to citizenship. The U.S. ought to commit thousands of ground troops to the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Bombing Libya advanced American interests. Medicare Part D was a…

by Andrea Neal Fulton County historian Shirley Willard calls round barns the “cathedrals” of the countryside. They are symbols of a bygone time in Indiana agriculture when farmers combined form, function and aesthetics. Their heyday was 1890 to 1915. Agricultural experts of the day advocated round barns as efficient and economical. Architect Benton Steele of Pendleton advertised them as “the cheapest and best from every standpoint” with their “ordinary joist frame construction, assisted by the…

by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. Imagine a world where cars no longer require repairs and maintenance. Would this be good for the economy and society? For individuals and the economy, the costs of this improvement are obvious. Producers of auto parts and engine fluids would go bankrupt, with job losses and investment failures. Service providers of oil changes and timing belts would be out of work. This would be difficult for these folks, especially if they…