Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, I was surrounded by multi-generational Irish families whose capacity for storytelling and singing left a deep impression on me. When, in the last few years, my parents died a year apart, the celebrations of their lives were marked by the presence of lots of Irish friends. In fact, their heartfelt Irish mourning was a model for others. After the funeral for my father, I received texts from friends asking me for copies of some of the toasts that were given. People were hungry for language that, at a moment of great loss, would help them to remember and mourn, to laugh and cry. The Irish, like many other immigrant communities, know how to respond to death — something we seem to be losing in our wider culture.

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The seventeenth-century mathematician, philosopher, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal once remarked, "The truth is so obscured these days that only those who love it will find it."

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I spent the early part of the summer teaching an online symbolic logic class at Baylor. One of the refreshing things about teaching logic is how tidy so much of it is. There are rules for testing arguments; it's easy to tell when an answer is wrong and equally easy to say why it's wrong. To take a simple example: a thing cannot simultaneously be "A" and "not A," at least not at the same time and in the same way. Those are mutually exclusive. In higher level logic classes, much debated foundational questions arise, but not so much in an introductory class.

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As the sixth and final season of Better Call Saul, the AMC spin-off prequel to Breaking Bad, reaches its conclusion (the series finale airs this evening: Monday, August 15), it is receiving nearly universal accolades, including a glut of Emmy nominations. Although occasionally punctuated by intense conflict and violence, its pace is often more leisurely than what was common on Breaking Bad. In very different ways both shows provide compelling depictions of human evil and its devastating consequences, not just for the victims but also for the perpetrators.

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Half of all people released from U.S. prisons return within three years. That's a sobering statistic, but it's one that can improve with help, in part, by a program pioneered right here in Texas.

The Prison Entrepreneurship Program, which operates in prisons outside of Dallas and Houston, is a highly interactive curriculum taught largely by business executives.

PEP includes a business plan curriculum joined to an intensive character assessment and development program, which helps "each individual to identify and remove the character traits and behaviors that stand in the way of positive life transformation."

More than 500 businesses have been launched by PEP graduates.

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