Technocracy Versus The Great Books
By Peter Lawler | One of the great prejudices of our time is that direct information is king. But the great books offer another, more satisfying way to realize truth. Here’s what I read in the Boston Globe from a reporter at a great books conference at St. John’s College in Santa Fe: ‘Conservatives no…
New 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…
The Big Bang Theory: From Caricature to Complexity
By Peter Augustine Lawler | The highly rated CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory compensates for its lack of refinement (it has a laugh track!) with its brains. The show began with characters who were more like caricatures of four types of physical scientists: the theoretical physicist (Sheldon Cooper), the…
Up from Hell: Dante’s Lessons for Millennials
By Rod Dreher | I was late coming to Dante. Never read him in high school or college, and after my formal education ended with my bachelor’s degree, why on earth would I have bothered? As a professional journalist, I read voraciously, but a seven-hundred-year-old poem by a medieval Catholic was not high on…
FTU Course: Does Capitalism Hurt the Poor?
Capitalism is often decried as exploitative and morally evil. The “1%” causes the “99%” to suffer. Does free market capitalism make the poor poorer? Weigh the evidence and decide yourself. AVERAGE TIME: 2 HOURS. 1,000 IMPACT POINTS…
The Illusion of Neutrality; A Regnant Fallacy
By Anthony Esolen | The secular state cannot be neutral in matters of religion. We have all heard what has come to be a liberal dictum, that the State must remain neutral as regards religion or irreligion. One can show fairly easily that the men who wrote our constitution had no such neutrality in mind…
Are You Able to Live Without a Keyboard?
By Seth Godin | When the masses only connect to the net without a keyboard, who will be left to change the world? It is possible but unlikely that someone will write a great novel on a tablet. You can’t create the spreadsheet that changes an industry on a smart phone. And professional programmers don’t…
Can You Prove How American You Are?
By Publius | Being an American is a privilege. Can you pass the test required to be taken by every American immigrant? Sign in to www.freethinku.com to learn more about these course experiences, which are free for students and qualify them to participate in America’s fastest-growing college scholarship…
Mark It Up: To Annotate a Text, or Not?
By Charlie Wesley | As an undergraduate, I did not often annotate the texts I was assigned to read for class. Nor was I encouraged to. When I look back through the books I read as a freshman, I find they are utterly devoid of notations. A survey of my texts from sophomore and junior year yields a small…