There is perhaps no social movement more instrumental in shaping modern Western society than the Enlightenment. As I do not want even a basic understanding of history to be a prerequisite to reading this blog, I’ll recap, in a nutshell, why that is the case. In this brilliant flash of intellectual awakening, the philosophical, spiritual, psychological, and ethical foundations for so many of the

Who’s got kids? Some of you do, some don’t. For those who don’t, are you at least familiar with the general concept of children? You know, they start very small and, over the course of several years, get bigger and amass more knowledge and eventually become adults. Well that’s a grand arch, isn’t it? We’re definitely glossing over some details here. Not accounting for biology, what happens in

“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.” -    Arnold Bennett (British novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist, 1867-1931) In the last few blogs, we’ve been discussing political maturation in the West. It’s been a crazy ride! It’s sometimes a fun exercise to contemplate the course history has taken this particular culture and

I was killing time on Facebook (as so many of us do). I have quite a few politically-minded “friends” and I was following a rather long thread of a heated debate on ideology. There was a lot of back and forth about how Republicans in the U.S. would, if elected to power, destroy the country or that President Obama wasn’t really a Democrat but actually a moderate Republican. Someone wrote: “Libertarianism