StocktonAfterClass

Send us Fan Mail The Insurrection of 2021, An Anniversary Podcast On January 6, 2021 there was an attempt by an insurrectionist mob to block the certification of the 2020 Presidential Election.  This uprising came within the context of an American political system that had become seriously weakened over the past decades.  This weakened political system made it possible for an authoritarian leader...

Send us Fan Mail Archbishop Desmond Tutu was one of the three indispensable people whose actions saved South Africa from a violent transition when that country went to majority rule.  He created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an alternative to prosecutions and vengeance.  He also believed that the Black struggle in South Africa and the Palestinians struggle were very parallel.  He once...

Send us Fan Mail This is the story of the song  Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and how it came to be, with some commentary along the way by me.  I hope you do not find that distracting.  I forgot to mention that when this came out, we kids were a bit upset that the other reindeer were so mean to Rudolph.  We expected better of them.   But it turns out ok in the end.  In case you don't remembe...

Send us Fan Mail Christmas Songs:  Who?  What?  When? Where?  This is a discussion of the fifty-one most popular Christmas songs, when they were written, what themes they contain, and how the patterns of favorite Christmas songs changed over the centuries.  This is short, but you might find it an interesting approach to Christmas songs.  Please remember I am a social scientist.  I count things for...

Send us Fan Mail When John XXIII became pope in 1958, he was a compromise choice.  The powerful cardinals who wanted the job figured they could choose the elderly and sickly Cardinal  Roncalli of Venice.  They suspected he would not last long and then they could step in.  Little did they know that he would become one of the most significant popes.   John decided that the church had become stuffy a...

Send us Fan Mail    On December 1, 2021 the Supreme Court heard arguments on the Mississippi law that would effectively gut Roe vs Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion.  This podcast discusses those arguments and some of the issues surrounding that case.  There is a discussion of Roe and also of Casey, the Supreme Court case that allowed modifications of Roe.  The...

Send us Fan Mail ing a Church  Littlefield Avenue Presbyterian congregation has existed for 91 years.  On November 21, 2021 we closed the church building for good.  While the membership was fading, it was really the floods of 2021 that made the decision necessary.  In Presbyterian terminology, what happened is called decommissioning.  To Presbyterians a building is just a building until it is dedi...

Send us Fan Mail Memorable Students  Did you ever wonder how life looks from the other side of the desk?  This is your chance to find out.  During my last semester, my wife suggested that I prepare two farewell lectures discussing my career.  One would focus upon Memorable Students, one upon Memorable People I have encountered.  This is the talk on Memorable Students.   This was a zoom lecture for...

Send us Fan Mail Biography of a Graveyard  Back in 2001 I had just published a book and had no projects on my plate.  I decided to use part of my summer to create an inventory of all of the gravestones in my home town graveyard.  This is Horse Prairie graveyard in Sesser, Illinois about 500 miles south of Detroit.  It is a very lovely graveyard, surrounded by farmland and rolling hills.  It is whe...

Send us Fan Mail Rerum Novarum For those of you who are Catholics, I have bad news for you.  There was a time in the 1800s when your church went over the edge, in terms of what you value today.  It renounced reading of unapproved books, it renounced what you would think of as education, it renounced curiosity, and it even renounced the existence of Germany and Italy.  (The pope had a vested intere...

Send us Fan Mail Some decades ago, I was involved in a church that had a destructive conflict.  Congregational and regional officials mismanaged the conflict in a way that escalated it.  The conflict went through an ecclesiastical court system. (Few members even knew such courts existed, much less that individual members could file accusations against other  members).  There were formal accusation...

Send us Fan Mail General Powell was one of the great men of his age.  He could have been President.  He made one serious mistake in his career and it tarnished his reputation.  Every single comment on his life will mention it.  These are my thoughts.  Note:  Factual error. Sorry about that.   It was 1996 that General Powell announced that he would not be a candidate.  He had appeared ready to decl...

Send us Fan Mail These are four stories, just for fun.  I call them Bad Hair Day Crazy Lady on the Phone A Halloween Misadventure Gato's Halloween The stores are all ahead of the curve in terms of selling Halloween decorations so I figured I might as well get ahead of the curve with stories about Halloween.  I hope you like them. 

Send us Fan Mail Suppressing Dissent                               This is not an easy topic.  It was a lecture delivered to my class on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in November, 2020. It focuses upon how difficult it is to engage in serious discussion of the conflict and of how there are organized efforts to disrupt or silence debate.   One issue is that there are groups trying to define the...

Send us Fan Mail How a Pope is Elected    This is a discussion of a papal election, with special attention to the election of John Paul II.   This was a classroom lecture and is an hour and ten minutes long.   There is a discussion of the ideological factions in the church, and the regional divisions.   The successful candidate is able to put together a coalition of votes that incorporates the ide...

Send us Fan Mail This podcast has two parts.  The first part is a discussion of the Scopes Trial of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee.  Tennessee had passed a law restricting the teaching of evolution and a science teacher named John Scopes decided to challenge it.  The second part is a talk I delivered at a conference on Religion and Science.  Interesting Factoid:  Those who argue against evolution say t...

Send us Fan Mail The Palestinian Refugees of 1948 This is an extremely important topic surrounded by false narratives and inflammatory rhetoric.  I have put off preparing a podcast for some time, but not because it is sensitive.  I deal with quite a few sensitive topics.  It goes with the territory.  But in this case, a reason for my hesitation is that I have a written briefing document that is th...

Send us Fan Mail Hannah Arendt was one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century.  She was a German Jew.   Some of her books were targeted to academics and other intellectuals but her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in the New Yorker and achieved wide readership.   It also plunged her into deep controversy, if that is even an adequate word for the vilification she experienced...

Send us Fan Mail September II.  Part two.  September 13.  This is podcast two on the topic of September 11.  The first podcast focused on the day itself. This one focuses upon what happened next.  I spoke to a campus gathering.  I spoke to the Archdiocese of Detroit.  And I spoke to many people whose stories and experiences are reported here. 

Send us Fan Mail September 11.  Recollections and Reflections from 2001   Back in 2001 I was keeping a journal.  These are some things I recorded on one of the worst days in American history.   Two days later, on September 13, the Chancellor held a commemoration event on campus and I was asked to speak.  That will be a separate podcast.  Oops.  A glitch.  I said the 1973 bombing of the World Trade...

Send us Fan Mail Abram Leon, The Jewish Question.  Abram Leon was a Jewish intellectual and activist.  He was a Marxist of the Trotskyite tendency.  He was also a Zionist.  He lived in Palestine for a time as a child but his family returned to Europe and he moved from Poland, where he had been born, to Belgium.  The Nazi movement plunged him into reflections on why there had been such tension arou...

Send us Fan Mail The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy  Back in 2007 two of America's great strategic thinkers wrote a book entitled The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy.  They were John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard.   This book, which was extremely readable,  became a sensation, as you might guess.   It even became a best seller, which is amaz...

Send us Fan Mail This podcast is just for fun.  It is about a vacation we took in England, in the Lake District.  We went with our dear German friend, Sibylle Laurischk.  It was a special vacation.  We met the Queen.  (Well, sort of.  She came while we were there and we were able to see her and Princess Anne).  We also climbed the mighty Helvelyn and avenged an earlier defeat when we had tried to...

Send us Fan Mail Afghanistan:  A Background Briefing  This is the first podcast Briefing, focusing upon something in the headlines.  I would often do briefings such as this in a class, when some major event occurred.  Some of those classroom briefings were fairly short, maybe 15 minutes.  Others would last over an hour.   Students liked these.  The briefings linked analysis with the headlines.  Th...

Send us Fan Mail Marx on Religion   In my class on Religion and Politics, I had three lectures on the Marxian model.  One was on Marx’s view of religion; one was how Marx analyzed the situation of the Jews in Europe; and one was on a fascinating person named Abram Leon.  He was a Zionist and a Trotskyite.  In 1944 he wrote a book trying to make sense of what was happening to the Jews in Europe.  ...