I spent the early part of the summer teaching an online symbolic logic class at Baylor. One of the refreshing things about teaching logic is how tidy so much of it is. There are rules for testing arguments; it's easy to tell when an answer is wrong and equally easy to say why it's wrong. To take a simple example: a thing cannot simultaneously be "A" and "not A," at least not at the same time and in the same way. Those are mutually exclusive. In higher level logic classes, much debated foundational questions arise, but not so much in an introductory class.

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As the sixth and final season of Better Call Saul, the AMC spin-off prequel to Breaking Bad, reaches its conclusion (the series finale airs this evening: Monday, August 15), it is receiving nearly universal accolades, including a glut of Emmy nominations. Although occasionally punctuated by intense conflict and violence, its pace is often more leisurely than what was common on Breaking Bad. In very different ways both shows provide compelling depictions of human evil and its devastating consequences, not just for the victims but also for the perpetrators.

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Half of all people released from U.S. prisons return within three years. That's a sobering statistic, but it's one that can improve with help, in part, by a program pioneered right here in Texas.

The Prison Entrepreneurship Program, which operates in prisons outside of Dallas and Houston, is a highly interactive curriculum taught largely by business executives.

PEP includes a business plan curriculum joined to an intensive character assessment and development program, which helps "each individual to identify and remove the character traits and behaviors that stand in the way of positive life transformation."

More than 500 businesses have been launched by PEP graduates.

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On the same day that I was finishing reading a bracing new book, Paul Kahn's Testimony, a memoir about family betrayal, vengeance and the lack of love and mercy, someone sent me a clip of late night host Stephen Colbert discussing how his faith is connected to his comedy.

The intersection of the two themes set me thinking about the nature of faith and how its presence or absence can profoundly change our lives.

Colbert speaks about the connection among humor, sacrifice, and hope that are bound up in his faith. Kahn, a Yale University legal scholar, sees in his parents' lives a secular parable of a post-religious world in which forgiveness is impossible and hope in the face of death is no longer sustainable.

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Last spring there was a surprising uproar in reaction to Howard University's decision to shutter its classics department, featuring critical commentary in major newspapers and cable shows. Given that better funded universities were also eliminating or scaling back classics and humanities programs—a point made by Howard's president in defense of the decision—why the furor over Howard?

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