Posts Tagged civic literacy

What We Don’t Know DOES Hurt Us…

The other day, I was grading a research paper produced by  a graduate student who shares my concerns over civic literacy. The paper included a comprehensive review of available research on the topic, much of which confirmed what we had already known about the American public’s appalling deficit in basic knowledge of our government and [...]

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The Body Politic

Tonight, I’ll chair a Spirit and Place Panel on “The Body Politic” at the Indiana Statehouse. I hope some of you can attend; for those who can’t, here are my introductory remarks. I’d like to introduce the panel: Eric Meslin is Associate Dean and Director of the Center for Bioethics at the IU School of [...]

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Pathetic Policy Discourse

There are a lot of examples of what happens when those making policy don’t know what they are talking about, but here’s one that just annoys the hell out of me every time it comes up. The New York legislature is preparing to vote on whether the state will recognize same-sex marriage. The Times reports [...]

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The Politics We Deserve

My speech to the Annual Meeting of the Jewish Community Relations Council. ___________ We have just emerged from one of the most depressing sessions of the Indiana legislature I can remember. It was anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-teacher, anti-public-employee…We passed a mean-spirited and largely unconstitutional immigration bill. We defunded Planned Parenthood, in violation of federal law, [...]

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What Ted Said

My upcoming IBJ column. Right now, Americans are deeply involved in one of our periodic debates about government spending and the budget deficit. Important as that is, I am more concerned about our civic deficit—the widespread lack of basic constitutional literacy. In these pages a couple of weeks ago, recently-retired Indiana Justice Ted Boehm made [...]

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