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Within the first couple years of my joining the faculty of Saint Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic University, my chairman asked me to attend a dinner sponsored by the Jesuits. The goal of the dinner was for the Jesuits to assess the Jesuit mission at the School of Medicine. After dinner, we were each asked to introduce ourselves. One after the other, the faculty said they had attended Jesuit universities and/or medical schools and asserted that that experience conferred a special concern for ethics and morality that they carried since. I was the only member of the party that, while having been raised Roman Catholic, only trained in secular universities. I told everyone that I felt my training also prepared me for a moral and ethical life, and I couldn’t discern anything unique about the morality of Saint Louis University faculty. After I went home, I pondered this idea and came up with an experimental test. Over the 40-year span of the Tuskegee syphilis study, there must have been h...

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) was coined to describe Trump’s flip-flops on tariffs, but he’s flip-flopped on other notorious threats. “The Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, according to people familiar with the matter.   “The Justice Department as soon as Monday was expected to drop its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down President Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey.    “Trump issued a string of  executive orders last year  against several law firms and individual lawyers that would have stripped security clearances, restricted their access to federal buildings and directed agencies to end any federal contracts with the firms and their clients.   “The White House campaign sent a chill through the industry. Fear of the orders also prompted other large firms  to make deals with the presiden...

In the ancient world, people saw signs and portents in eclipses, weather and earthquakes. The God(s) must be trying to tell them something, they believed. By the beginning of the 20 th  century, educated people should have abandoned such primitivism. And most did. But reality, facts and evidence continue to confound evangelical Christians.   “Hagee’s blood moon prophecies have become enormously popular in evangelical circles. The Christian Broadcasting Network   cited   them this week in its coverage of the war. An “ analysis ” the network published on its website acknowledged that the blood moons might be a coincidence, but that “doesn’t mean there also wasn’t an intentional message that was pre-ordained from the time God set the sun, moon, and planets in motion in Genesis 1.” The blood moons, along with the war, could be a sign of the end-times.   “Hagee may be the godfather of Iran-related prophecies, but prophets echoing them have become commonplace.   ...

There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts around nearly every corner here in Rhode Island, or so it seems. And there’s a cemetery just a block away from our house. Coincidence? We report, you decide. But the mortality rate here doesn’t seem markedly higher than anywhere else I’ve lived. But RFK Jr is coming for your Dunkin’, Rhode Island! “We’re going to ask Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, ‘Show us the safety data that show that it’s OK for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it,’” Kennedy told the applauding audience. “I don’t think they’re gonna be able to do it.” OK, not the donuts, just the sweetened coffee. But all sugar? Or just above a certain amount? Who pays for the sugar police? Pick up any bottle of prepared salad dressing, soda, soups or ketchup and read the ingredients. Many prepared foods on the grocery shelf have added sugar, either in the form of sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup. That’s not going away. And of course, there isn’t an atom of evidence that it...

During my 37 years on the faculty (I’m emeritus now) of Saint Louis University, I never expected to find my university included on a list of elite and Ivy League research universities. And yet, here we are: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is  cutting academic ties  between the Pentagon and 13 leading universities in a performative campaign against “wokeness” and alleged anti-Americanism. The disfavored schools, according to a Feb. 27  memo  from Hegseth’s office, currently educating are:   Harvard University Saint Louis University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tufts University Georgetown University Carnegie Mellon University Brown University Columbia University Yale University Middlebury College Princeton University The George Washington University College of William and Mary   Kinda makes me proud. On the other hand, among the “favored” universities are my alma maters University of Tennessee and University ot North Carolina, a distinction they share...

There’s absolutely no evidence that Iran has, or has ever possessed, nuclear weapons. Indeed, the Obama Administration negotiated an agreement whereby Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons or even enrich uranium to the purity necessary to create a fission bomb. Trump tore up that agreement, but there’s no evidence that Iran made any progress toward an atom bomb since then. Still, last June Trump claimed to have obliterated Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program. Now he’s claiming that his attack on Iran was justified because their nuclear weapons posed an immanent existential threat. So is the Iranian atom bomb dead or alive? “Speaking from the East Room at the start of a ceremony to award the Medal of Honor to a trio of U.S. Army soldiers who’d served in the Second World War, the Vietnam War and Afghanistan, the president said Iran’s ballistic missile capability would have “soon” been able to reach beyond hitting American bases in the Middle East and Europe to hit “our beauti...