Conservative Conversation + Podcasts

Even if it disturbs my fellow Ricochetti, this must be said. I am Woke. To start with, I still cannot get over the exhilaration of discovering the courage to express my disapproval of police killing unarmed suspects in custody. I never believed I had it in me to put myself out there like that. I really feel good about myself.

When the protests too quickly turned to looting and arson, I was able to understand that replaceable stuff is nothing compared to a guy’s life. When the destruction became extensive, when I learned that lots of people were injured and some killed, when there were dozens of reports and videos of people being dragged out of vehicles and beaten or stomped into a coma on the sidewalk, I was consoled to learn that there were also people injured by tear gas and rubber bullets so I could again refocus on the police.

The hot new definition of racism has nothing to do with hatred of people based on their skin color. Racism is being redefined as “support for policies that increase racial inequality.” Not being racist isn’t good enough, now we have to be “anti-racist.”

OK.

(Well, maybe more than a few.)

My wife and I are Roman Catholics. She is a “cradle Catholic”; I converted to Catholicism nearly forty years ago. During that time, we’ve seen the Church’s problems (the pedophilia scandals, doctrinal squabbles, etc.) however, we would never entertain the idea of leaving the faith. Most of our Catholic friends feel the same way.

Mitch Daniels is the former governor of Indiana (2005–13), former director of the Office of Management and Budget (2001–03), and current president of Purdue University (since 2013). In this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Robinson, Daniels discusses his insistence on keeping Purdue’s tuition below $10,000 and how he does it, his vision for Purdue that includes mix of online and onsite education, and his efforts to hire an ideologically diverse faculty and recruit students from various backgrounds and ethnicities. He also shares his thoughts on the recent civil unrest, protests, and looting across the United States, and his plans on how to open Purdue and keep it open this fall amid the continuing COVID-19 crisis.

We all know about the “big” Hollywood-worthy biblical events – the Flood, the splitting of the sea, the revelation at Sinai. These are the ways in which G-d intervenes in the physical world, with sounds and lights and fury.

But the Torah really only mentions those things by way of explaining how the Torah came into being in the first place: the Flood explains how G-d reacts to a world of pure violence and evil, just as the splitting of the sea was a national birth for the Jewish People, and Sinai represents the giving of the Torah itself. These events, though dramatic and exciting, were only a means to an end, a way of helping us understand how we each can have an ongoing and growing relationship with each other and with our Creator.