Edward Stringham on Fed Policy 

Fox Business via American Institute for Economic Research website

Video: Edward Stringham, Davis Professor of Economic Organizations and Innovation, speaking in his role as president of the American Institute for Economic Research, joins Fox Business to discuss the Federal Reserve’s most recent rate hike.

 

Divine seniors: How religion, spirituality sustain Long Islanders as they age

Newsday

…Barry Kosmin, research professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, attributes older individuals’ “religious behaviors and affiliations” to the likelihood that they have more time on their hands than, say, “a 30-year-old who takes kids to soccer practice” on the weekend instead of attending services. What’s more, for many older adults, going to church or synagogue is a ritual rooted in their childhood.

“Old habits die hard,” said Kosmin, who also serves as the principal investigator of the university’s American Religious Identification Survey Series, which tracks changes in the religious allegiances of the country’s adults…

 

Beyond The U.S.-Mexico Border: A Look At Changes To U.S. Immigration Policy

“Where We Live” – WNPR (Connecticut public radio)

Podcast: Starting at 37:08, the podcast features in-studio guest Abigail Fisher Williamson, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Law at Trinity College, author of Welcoming New Americans? Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation and coeditor of The Politics of New Immigrant Destinations

 

Op-Ed: Your Dean Favors Experiential Liberal Arts: Now What? – By Jack Dougherty [Faculty Director of Community Learning at Trinity’s Center for Hartford Engagement and Research (CHER)] and Megan Faver Hartline [Director of Community Learning at CHER]

Campus Compact Southern New England

Imagine this not-so-hypothetical scenario: You’re a newer faculty member at a liberal arts college, and your dean has published an op-ed essay calling for “experiential” liberal arts “to break down the barrier between classroom learning and everyday life.” But what exactly does “experiential” mean, especially in academic disciplines without established traditions in laboratories, studios, or field work? Is this a meaningful foundational shift — or yet another higher education fad? How should newer faculty respond to this tension between philosophical aspirations of what liberal arts learning might become in the future versus pragmatic advice on how to survive and build your scholarly career over the next few years? …

 

Carbon Dividend Act gets support from head of bishops’ justice office

National Catholic Reporter

…In addition to being cast as too burdensome on consumers, carbon taxes have also drawn criticism as not doing enough as a response to the enormity of a challenge that climate change presents.

Mark Silk, professor of religion in public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in a mid-December column for Religion News Service compared using a tax incentive to spur action on climate change to a hypothetical scenario where Abraham Lincoln, rather than abolishing slavery through a constitutional amendment, instead proposed a tax on the ownership of human beings, or where Franklin Roosevelt left pre-World War II mobilization to taxing automobiles to spur car factories to instead produce tanks and planes.

“Taxation — incentivizing good behavior by jacking up the price of bad — deals with a problem indirectly, at one step removed,” Silk wrote, offering taxes on cigarettes as one example. “But where the bad behavior has led to a profound crisis, the indirect approach undermines urgency, making for cognitive dissonance.”…