Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson I hope you can see the irony in the announcement from George Washington University. The administration announced that it would no longer require history majors to take a class in American history. Yes, the university named for our first American president won’t require students graduating with a history degree to actually take a course on the history of this country. I guess this shouldn’t be so surprising. I remember when my alma mater, Yale University, decided to return…

Kerby Anderson The crime rate is up in many cities, so maybe its time to consider a solution rarely suggested. Let’s see what faith-based organizations and people of faith can do. The evidence is that they can reduce the crime rate and the recidivism rate in our prisons. This is the argument Baylor University criminologist Byron Johnson makes in his book, More God, Less Crime. Sadly most social scientists and even criminologists seem reluctant to make the connection between faith…

Kerby Anderson During the first week of January, Senator Rand Paul urged Republicans not to repeal Obamacare without having a replacement plan ready. Friday night his phone rang. It was Donald Trump. He agreed with the senator that repeal and replace needs to take place simultaneously. This means that the replace part of the equation will be getting much more attention. Everyone will have to explain their positions. Those who support the Affordable Care Act and do not want it…

Kerby Anderson On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, let me suggest that you take some time to read his letter from a Birmingham Jail. If you are young, I think it will give you a better idea of what the civil rights movement in the 1960s was all about. If you are older, it will remind you of some forgotten events and chapters in American history. I realize that it will take some time to read his letter. When I…

Penna Dexter As the president-elect chooses his cabinet we’re reminded of the size and complexity of our federal government. One wonders, can this really be changed? Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, is one observer who is hopeful. In the December issue of Hillsdale’s publication Imprimis, he writes “our government has swollen beyond recognition.” The founders enshrined a separation of powers in the Constitution so that each branch could work to keep the others in check. We have come to…

Kerby Anderson The millennial generation may reject God but they feel entitled to go to heaven. That is the conclusion of Nick Pitts in a column he wrote last year. He was on my program last week to talk about various aspects of the millennial generation. This conclusion was one of the most interesting. Quoting from some of the research by Professor Jean Twenge, Nick Pitts shows that Americans are much less spiritual than they were in the past. Americans…

Kerby Anderson At a university where Mike Adams is a professor, the Faculty Senate Steering Committee passed a resolution condemning faculty members for public comments on the demographic characteristics of students. They did so because of a free speech controversy that involved professor Mike Adams. In a recent column, Mike Adams used the resolution to raise a larger issue that I think universities need to seriously consider. If this university wants to stop publicly referring to the demographic makeup of…

Kerby Anderson Fake news is still in the news. In fact, PolitiFact designated “Fake News” as the “2016 Lie of the Year.” Some of the examples they cited are: “Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop” and “Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally chanted: We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back.” None of these or other stories are true. Robert Knight in a recent column laments the…

Kerby Anderson If I were to ask you to name a national monument, you would probably pick the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty. President Obama has a different idea. He designated vast acreages in Utah and Nevada as national monuments. The 1906 Antiquities Act gives the president the authority to create national monuments from federal lands. In recent decades, only a few presidents have used this law. Perhaps the most notable was when President Clinton designated the Grand…

Kerby Anderson Economist Thomas Sowell filed his last column a little over a week ago. At the age of 86, he certainly has earned his retirement. We will miss his insight, but benefit from the books and columns he has written over the years. One of his last few columns had the engaging title “Football and Fallacies.” As is so often the case, he takes on one of the fallacies of the liberal left. He talks about the reaction from…

Penna Dexter It’s widely expected that, not long after Inauguration Day, confirmation proceedings will begin to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. What is less-discussed, but highly consequential, is that once Donald Trump is sworn in as the new president, he will have 103 judicial vacancies to fill. It’s a pretty big number. To put it in perspective, President Obama had 54 open seats to fill upon entering the White House. (This despite the fact that President Obama…