The 2008 political campaign season, including both the presidential campaign and the many state ballot initiatives, provided numerous examples of how dialogue, reason, clear thinking and all the other virtues of a healthy democratic-republic were largely set aside. At most…

Some years ago a Christian friend and I found ourselves discussing angels. My friend talked as if he had just returned from heaven and his first Angel Conference. To substantiate his claims of how angels are involved in our lives,…

Hopefully you’ve had the privilege of hearing and seeing the Abbott and Costello comedy routine “Who’s on First” [Footnote 1]. In it, Costello has been offered a baseball contract to play for the New York Yankees, and Abbott is offered…

Recently, I wrote about how the linguistic fallacy called ambiguity contributed to the 1839 martyrdom of John Williams — one of my ancestors, and a pioneering missionary to Polynesia. I also related how the religious instruction we often get as Catholics…

I suppose it was because it was the 1960s. That might have been the reason. College and university students around the country were up in arms, literally. There were sit-ins, break-ins, love-ins, and shoot-outs. Trustees, administrators, police, and sometimes the…

When I came into Catholicism, a number of non-Christians and Protestant Christians asked me: “How could a good Christian like you ever become a Catholic?” It was a classic case of the fallacy we’re going to examine in this chapter.…

On November 20, 1839, John Williams, my ancestor and one of the early pioneering missionaries to Polynesia, crawled down the side of the London Missionary Society’s sailing ship Camden, and with two colleagues rowed a skiff toward the beach at…

“But Dad! You’re not listening,” my teenage daughter wailed. A crying woman has never been something I can understand or deal with easily. If I tell her to stop crying and think rationally about the question, I’m being “insensitive.” If…

Ben Stein’s documentary, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, questions the truth-seeking motivation of some in the scientific community who attempt to debunk the overwhelming evidence of intelligent design in the observable universe. Everywhere you look, from sub-atomic particles, to the far…

Some years ago, I was working on a video documentary for Ford Motor Company about the famous American industrial statistician, W. Edwards Deming, who is credited with transforming Japan’s industrial quality after WWII, and making the Japanese the competitive powerhouse they are today.