Volume 69

Guests on Volume 69: John McWhorter, author of Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, on the death of formal speech; Douglas Koopman, on the mis-steps and misunderstandings that hampered the Bush administration’s implementation of Faith-Based Initiatives; Daniel Ritchie, on the survival of “Great Books” programs at religious colleges; Vincent Miller, on how the commodification of everything affects our sense of religious faith and practice (and on how we can resist); and Barrett Fisher, on the sources of humor in the two versions of The Ladykillers, and on the history of very serious thinking about what makes something funny. Linguist John McWhorter has, for a number of years, been interested in the major change in the usage of language and speech that took place in the 1960s in America. In his book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, he notes that before the change there were at