September is National Recovery Month. Across Utah, people will gather this month to celebrate something worth celebrating: People can recover from addiction. But there is a question we don't ask nearly as often. What happens after they do? We tell people struggling with addiction to ...

Labor Day arrives each year as summer begins to loosen its grip. Families gather, grills are lit, and millions of Americans enjoy a well-earned day of rest. Yet the holiday should mean more than a long weekend. It should remind us of the dignity of work, the sacrifices of those who built this ...

I recently read an article about the importance of students having a “sense of mattering,” and that phrase has really stuck with me. In higher education, we talk a lot about belonging. We want students to feel connected to their university, their classes, their professors and each other. ...

A farmer can't make his plants grow, but he can create the conditions that lead to their flourishing. A society can't make its citizens virtuous, but it can nurture the institutions that lead to virtuous citizens. Great thinkers in Western civilization have long noted the importance of ...

History illuminates the present. I've been reading Stephen Kotkin's widely and justly praised multivolume biography of Joseph Stalin and have encountered many passages that illuminate the present. I learned, for example, that Stalin met the exiled Vladimir Lenin more than a decade before ...

When asked about Labor Day, I suspect most people immediately think about the benefits of having a three-day weekend in early September. It's a day off! It's time to head out of town or go fishing or have a barbecue or go swimming or wrap up summer in some other fashion. But I've been ...