By Brian Bishop on July 9, 2009
Lest anyone imagine this a paean to the spring ritual of Brown’s varsity baseball season, we’re speaking here of an intellectual squeeze play. We’ll leave for another day the question of whether our vernal worship in the ‘house that Ruth [Babe not Simmons] built’ is but another of Marx or Sade’s opiates of the masses.
Still, [...]
Posted in Brown University | Tagged May 2009, Volume VII Number IV
By Brian Bishop on October 24, 2008
Massachusetts, once so known for outpacing its neighbors in government theft that it was labeled Taxachusetts, can brag about its comparative improvement – at least to other New England states. But its proclivity for holidays – Bunker Hill Day, Patriots Day, Evacuation Day, Juneteenth – still outpaces Rhode Island, which holds stubbornly to only VJ [...]
Posted in Brown University | Tagged October 2008, Parents’ Weekend, Volume VII Number II
By Brian Bishop on May 8, 2008
The Janus Lecture Series at Brown concluded with an Earth Day theme presenting an unlikely triumvirate of socio-economic thinkers discussing climate change. Global Warming wreaked havoc upon the presentation with glorious spring weather filling the Pembroke Green rather than the lecture at Alumnae Hall (although weather-norming could only report that the event was quite well [...]
Posted in Brown University | Tagged April 2008, Volume VI Number VII
By Brian Bishop on March 21, 2008
Drawing its seminal inspiration from the William F. Buckley, Jr., of the 18th century, Edmund Burke, the conservative movement might be thought to have all but foresworn revolutionary intent. Although known for his stinging critique of the French Revolution’s abandonment of civil protections for life and property, Burke was, nonetheless, a philosophical supporter of the [...]
Posted in National | Tagged March 2008, Volume VI Number V
By Brian Bishop on November 16, 2006
“Let us begin with a clock.”(pg. 1)
Thus commences the angst ridden report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, regarding the family clock of Admiral Esek Hopkins. His captaining of the slave voyage of the Sally overshadows to the point of nullity his service to the nation as the first commander of [...]
Posted in Brown University | Tagged November 2006, Thanksgiving, Volume V Number IV
By Brian Bishop on September 1, 2006
Noted atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett was spreading his ‘gospel’ at Harvard recently, i.e., his new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Dennett opened ironically by embracing naturalism, a religion rooted in natural phenomenon. He even encouraged donations to the lecture’s sponsor, the Center for Naturalism. This immediately brought to mind what might [...]
Posted in Culture | Tagged September 2006, Volume V Number I
By Brian Bishop on January 1, 2006
Gordon Wood, holding forth on “The Origins of American Constitutionalism”, found it first necessary to hold forth on the origins of such a topic on college campuses. While colleges understandably bridle at federal mandates of the sort that Robert Byrd slipped into an omnibus appropriations bill requiring an educational program on the US Constitution each [...]
Posted in Brown University | Tagged January 2006, Volume IV Number I
By Brian Bishop on March 1, 2005
The Reagan Revolution has been properly feted of late as its architect bid a final farewell to the field of battle. Given that one says nothing but good of the dead unless they were President, his critics have been remarkably quiet – largely limiting their contributions to suggestions that the Soviet Union would have collapsed [...]
Posted in National | Tagged March 2005, Volume III Number I
