Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast.

There are people we meet who have but little roles to play in our lives, who happen to be no more than a special appearance to our story.People, who influence, who possess the drift, the force whose implication leads us forward in our course of life. We might have never come across them until today and probably not hear from them tomorrow or ever after, for all that exists is this moment, a moment enough for them to fulfil their purpose that being to help us find our way and enough for us to fulfil ours that being to actually find it, reach it, accomplish it. They are the ones who bring meaning to our lives, who happen to inspire, who spark a fire that we carry with us for the rest of our days, who are but pillars of hope and sometimes sacrifice, life-changers, life-savers, catalysts.

Indira was surrounded by people who had given up hope, who blamed their own misery on the influence of Christianity and western cultures, and yet, literally in the midst of squalor, her family had created a place of real beauty. It really makes you stop and think. Uncle Google should be spitting out eight hundred million things American schools have done right. The fact things are so screwed up makes no sense. If you believe Uncle Google, then we’ve done the exact opposite from Indira’s family—in the land of hope and plenty we’ve created a place that’s ugly. We have so much. Can things really be so bad? Maybe we can’t fix our schools because as individuals we’ve never truly been broken. Or maybe Chinese lanterns make everyone wax philosophical.

Each human being deals with hurt or resentment in a unique way. When you feel insulted or bullied, you may reach for a chocolate bar. In the same circumstance, I might burst into tears. Another person may put his or her feelings quickly into words, confronting the mistreatment directly. Although our feelings can influence how we wish to act, our choices of how to behave are ultimately determined more by our attitudes and our habits. We respond to our emotional wounds based on what we believe about ourselves, how we think about the person who has hurt us, and how we perceive the world. Only in people who are severely traumatized or who have major mental illnesses is behavior governed by feelings. And only a tiny percentage of abusive men have these kinds of severe psychological problems.

Authorities this broad give the national security bureaucracy the power to scrutinize the personal lives of every law-abiding American. Allowing that to continue is a grave error that demonstrates a willful ignorance of human nature. Moreover, it demonstrates a complete disregard for the responsibilities entrusted to us by the Founding Fathers to maintain robust checks and balances on the power of any arm of the government. That obviously raises some very serious questions. What happens to our government, our civil liberties and our basic democracy if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked? As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority. Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person’s life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.

The prevalence of anti-patriotic attitudes among liberal intellectuals led some of them to warn their fellow liberals of the consequences of such attitudes for the future not of America but of American liberalism. Most Americans, as the American public philosopher Richard Rorty has written, take pride in their country, but 'many of the exceptions to this rule are found in colleges and universities, in the academic departments that have become sanctuaries for left-wing political views.' These leftists have done 'a great deal of good for . . . women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. . . . But there is a problem with this Left: it is unpatriotic. It repudiates the idea of a national identity and the emotion of national pride.' If the Left is to retain influence, it must recognize that a 'sense of shared national identity . . . is an absolutely essential component of citizenship.' Without patriotism, the Left will be unable to achieve its goals for America. Liberals, in short, must use patriotism as a means to achieve liberal goals

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors.

This is the Number. It is in the things we do, the people we meet, the ID cards that we carry. It's part of our identities, our credit cards, our social interactions. It takes our influences, our biases, morals, lifestyles and turns them into a massive alternate reality that no-one can escape from. It lives on our phones, in our televisions, in the cards we swipe to enter office. At its best, it’s an exact mirror of how human society actually works - all our greatness, all our petty shallowness, all our small talk and social contacts all codified and reduced and made plain. At its worst, it’s also exactly that. It’s how poor and rich and famous and desirable you are. It’s the backchannel given a name and dragged out into the limelight for everyone to see.

I think modern education over-emphasizes the intellect. I suppose that comes from the scientific trend of the times. You cannot obtain a useful citizen if you only develop his intellect. We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it " where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future. We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the State.I am inclined to trace our present social unrest to this over-valuation of the intellect. It hardens the heart and blights all generous impulses. What is going to replace the home, Mr. Keith?

His [brother in law Jim Hampson] appointment to the Episcopal parish in Wenham, near Gordon College brought them in close touch with leading evangelical faculty members in their pews and church leadership, including Elizabeth Elliot and Addison Leitch. They were instrumental in drawing Jim and and Sarah into the cutting edge of evangelical intellectual leadership, with friendships with Tom Howard and J.I. Packer. My ongoing relationship with Jim Packer, FitzSimons Allison and many other brilliant Anglican evangelicals would not have happened without Jim Hampson. His early influence on me in my transition from modern to classic Christian teaching was immense. While I was trying to demythologize Scripture, he was taking its plain meaning seriously. His strong preaching led him to become one of the founding sponsors and supporters of Trinity School of Ministry in Abridge, Pennsylvania...