Are you grateful to Hollywood? It sounds like you should be. According to anthropologist Grant McCracken, Hollywood has blessed us with “an accomplishment of some real significance.” In fact, McCracken insists that Hollywood and the public school system are “the most effective players” when it comes to battling “entrenched hostility, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia.” To benefit from some of this valuable moral guidance (and because it was raining), I decided to watch the 2008 Hollywood blockbuster Tropic Thunder.

When I started blogging a while back, I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d ever have to write about suicide three times in four months, but here we are.

CINCINNATI -- The first basket of the 2014-15 college basketball season went, fittingly, to Lauren Hill of Division III Mount St. Joseph.

Last month, the issue of assisted suicide and euthanasia was forced into front-page news when Brittany Maynard, a beautiful newlywed diagnosed with brain cancer, announced publicly that she planned to kill herself on November 1, and until then, was campaigning for the pro-suicide organization Compassion & Choices.