New FTU Course: Should We Eat Compassionately?
Amidst fast food and overflowing markets, does our eating really matter? Can our eating make the world better or worse? Many today are calling for us to change how we eat, but who has the right ideas? Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Graham Hill and others help answer the questions raised….
The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion
By Clyde Haberman | The second half of the 1960s was a boom time for nightmarish visions of what lay ahead for humankind. In 1966, for example, a writer named Harry Harrison came out with a science fiction novel titled “Make Room! Make Room!” Sketching a dystopian world in which too many people scrambled for…
Living with Children: Let Chores Teach Citizenship
By John Rosemond | A major U.S. newspaper recently ran a piece detailing all the ways children benefit from doing chores. Well, not all the ways. They failed to mention the most important benefit: Chores, properly managed, teach citizenship values. “Properly managed” means children are not compensated monetarily…
FTU Course: Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, or Something Else?
Are we killing off the human race or preserving our individual freedom through legal abortion? Both sides present their case in the debate. Sign in to the class here to learn more about this course experience, which is free for students and will qualify them to participate in America’s fastest-growing…
Do the Mental Health Sciences have a LGBT Blind Spot?
By Joseph Turner | Social workers are regularly tasked with diagnosing and treating people’s mental health issues. How can we if we accept that all same-sex attraction is healthy? A scene stands out to me from my graduate program in social work. A lesbian professor visited our class to tell about her experience…
The Cult of Healthy Eating Has More in Common with Religion than Science
By Alan Levinovitz | Food seems simple to study. If we can put a man on the moon, transplant a heart, and manipulate DNA, then surely we can unpack the relationship between eating vegetables and living longer. There’s no obvious difficulty in figuring out if wine decreases risk of heart disease, or if eating red…
New FTU Video on Baby Found in a Trash Bag Tops 1 Million Views
A video produced by Free Think University and Brownrygg Wools, and sponsored by The River Foundation, has topped 1 million views and is stirring conversation about the unpredictable value of human life, regardless of one’s pro-life/pro-choice perspective.
FTU Course: Has Science Buried God?
Have scientists established God as an archaic superstition? Watch two world renowned thinkers on this question debate the subject, and make up your own mind. Sign in to the class here to learn more about this course experience, which is free for students and will qualify them to participate in…
When Religious Extremism Feeds on Anxious Secularism
By Omar Belhaj Salah | Tunisia’s intelligentsia must move beyond seeing Muslim citizens as the violent ‘other’, instead embrace the right to peaceful religious expression. The roads leading to the radicalisation of young Arab-Muslims are manifold. Nevertheless, all roads begin when their domestic…