When I was a child, Christmas was the best time of the year. And what made it so exciting was that everyone seemed to join in the fun. There was a Santa in every store, songs like "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" played on the radio, and people generally acknowledged that the day had special meaning because of the Christ Child--thus the reason for the Christmas season.

WE ALL KNOW from experience that the world is an unfair place. Things seldom seem just or easy. It’s especially so in America today, where many people are struggling with job loss, health or financial issues, and a shaky economy.

A young dark-haired student, Chris Klicka, sat in my U.S. Constitutional History class at Grove City College around 1980. He was an excellent student with a particularly keen interest in questions about religious liberty and how that liberty might be protected.
What I did not know at the time was that he would become the untiring legal defender of fathers and mothers across this nation, many of them Christians, who wanted to school their children at home. His death is an immeasurable loss to that alternative schooling movement which has grown wider and deeper than he ever expected.

As someone who teaches and writes about international politics, I can confidently say that last week was one of the strangest in memory, from the G-20 circus in my backyard (Pittsburgh) to the political zoo at the United Nations. President Obama, of course, was front and center, including with a major speech at the United Nations.
What struck me wasn’t so much what Obama said as what others said about him. I cannot recall any time, in the entire history of the United Nations, where nearly every single one of the world’s worst rogue dictators came out of the woodwork to shower heaping praise on the president of the United States – Clinton or Bush, JFK or Reagan, Truman or Eisenhower, Democrat or Republican.