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Jul 10, 2024 | 
mindingthecampus.org | Alexander Riley
zero comment Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on July 10, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission. An empirical study of what is being taught and learned in university sociology courses around the country would be challenging to carry out.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
firstthings.com | Alexander Riley
I am presently rereading E. B. White’s novel Charlotte’s Web with my youngest child, who is eight. She is much enjoying this classic tale about the pig Wilbur and his friendship with the spider Charlotte, who hatches a clever plan to save him from the butcher’s knife. I don’t remember how old I was when I first read the book, but it is one of the earliest novels I can remember reading, maybe the first.
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Feb 20, 2024 | 
lexology.com | Alexander Riley |Sarah Stewart
Tuesday 20 February 2024 marks the third International Day Commemorating Air Crash Victims and Their Families, established by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in cooperation with the Air Crash Victims’ Families Federation International (ACVFFI). A year on from our previous article, associate Alexander Riley looks at the progress made in the aviation sector regarding the implementation of ICAO provisions.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
thefederalist.com | Alexander Riley
The moral valence of real-world situations is often complicated, with more gray than black and white. But other times, the moral clarity of a conflict is evident. So it is with the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine after Hamas terrorists carried out their brutal assault on Israeli civilians just over three months ago. I couldn’t help but think of this war as I reread Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men with one of my classes.
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Jan 3, 2024 | 
thefederalist.com | Alexander Riley
In keeping with the media’s broader and long-running effort to destigmatize obesity, NPR reported sympathetically in December that some doctors are refusing to talk about the health risks of obesity with their overweight patients, claiming that attending to the obesity of these patients leads to “misdiagnoses.”The story begins with an account of a Seattle woman who complains that when she needed surgery for a torn ligament in her thumb, the surgeon gave her “unsolicited advice” to lose weight.
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Nov 9, 2023 | 
firstthings.com | Alexander Riley
I am in a 1982 Volvo, headed north on I-5 toward Oceanside, at a pace I could easily beat on a bicycle. A universe of cars spreads to the north and the south. Twenty-five miles, on a five-lane freeway, will take an hour or more. How can people live like this? The ordeal of rush hour in Southern California can be only imperfectly apprehended by anyone who has not experienced it.
Through the car speakers, Alanis Morissette is howling. It is 1995.
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
thefederalist.com | Alexander Riley
At the core of the multiculturalist credo is the idea that there are no better or worse ways of doing anything cultural. There are just different ways, all of which can and should be perfectly equally embraced and celebrated (with the exception, of course, of all ways that can be associated with “colonizer/oppressor” peoples). The doctrine of cultural relativism in anthropology gets at it with clarity. All cultures came up with their own unique ways, through whatever cultural challenges they faced.
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Oct 30, 2023 | 
isi.org | Alexander Riley
Against the Titans: Theology and the Martyrdom of Alfred DelpBy Peter Nguyen(Fortress Academic, 2020)The capital of the southern Mexican state of Michoacán, Morelia—which I know well because it is the home of my in-laws—is named for José María Morelos y Pavón. This venerated hero of the Mexican national pantheon became the military leader of the Mexican movement for independence after the death of his friend Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla.
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Oct 17, 2023 | 
lucianne.com | Alexander Riley
Original ArticlePosted By: earlybird, 10/17/2023 5:20:01 PMThe far-left assault on the quality of intellectual and creative work is frequently neatly and explicitly acknowledged in the language of the diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) dogma that serves as the movement's philosophy.)smip) Sometimes the leftist assault on quality brazenly attacks standards by just inserting obviously inferior work in company with works of much higher quality. (snip).
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Jun 16, 2023 | 
thefederalist.com | Alexander Riley
Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the greatest American novelist since Faulkner, passed away on Tuesday. His fiction adeptly pinpoints the most profound aspects of American culture and identity, arguably outperforming the work of many sociologists. McCarthy was interested in the hardest questions about human existence, which produced in his work the depth common to all fiction widely considered “great.” This is certainly not the first time I have been struck by the richness of his work.
