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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The continuity between administration and teaching for me has always had to do with the question of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual development of young people. Finding creative ways to meet students where they are and draw them into the most important questions is a source of endless fascination for me. When it comes to education, it may be the case that, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, the only way to carry on sustained debate is from within and between rival traditions, assuming, that is, that members of a particular tradition are genuinely interested in engaging perspectives quite different from their own.

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You wouldn't know it from the Hollywood buzz machine, but on the first weekend of the month, in a limited release, the film Christmas with the Chosen: The Messengers raked in 8.45 million viewers and came in fifth at the box office. Originally scheduled for a limited three-day release, it has now been extended through Christmas, even while being made available via streaming.

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Blood Simple, the title of the Coen brothers' inaugural film, is detective code for the ways criminals become unhinged during or after the commission of violent acts. Dashiell Hammett, the early-twentieth-century author of hard-boiled detective stories such as The Maltese Falcon, seems to be the proximate source for the Coen brothers, but one can find all sorts of classical literary sources for this notion, from Shakespeare's Macbeth to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The latter contains the most sustained psychological analysis of the way a crime undoes its perpetrator. It also provides insight for us in our ongoing debates over crime, policing, and violence.

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