Have we thrown the parents out with the bathwater?

When my son was little, his aunt sent him a VHS tape of a TV character; Barney the purple dinosaur.  At the end was an “educational” message from Sandy Duncan, a celebrity attached to the series: “And remember kids, real friends come and go but imaginary friends are forever.”  I almost put my foot through...

Global Values, Human Rights and Character Education

We now know more than ever about what makes humans flourish. This has been driven by dramatic advances in genetics, psychological research, neurobiology, behavioral economics and a number of other disciplines in the past three decades. As New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests this “intellectual revolution” exposes the superficiality of public current policy debate....

Frankly, it’s phronesis: ethical insights from an outsider

First, a health warning for ethicists: I am not an ethicist. Second, it gets worse, a lot worse: I am a journalist. According to measures of moral credibility, my profession ranks marginally above cold-callers for accident claim firms and hedge fund managers. Journalism and ethics have had, for want of a better phrase, a bad...

Dramatic Moral Conversions: Do They Exist?

In this blog posting, I will be asking you for your views and stories on a phenomenon that intrigues me: dramatic and sudden (in other words, ‘epiphanic’) moral conversions. On the road to Damascus, Saul – the rabid persecutor of early Christians – reportedly went through an experience that had a profound effect on his...