Henry Petroski opens his postmortem of the 1986 Columbia space shuttle disaster with a quote from aerospace pioneer Theodore von Kármán. Scientists, Kármán famously writes, discover the world that exists. Engineers create the world that never was. Now a civil engineer on the faculty at Duke University, Petroski alleges the…

To my Middle Eastern-American son, You started kicking, just four weeks ago. I felt it first like the desperate flutters of nerves before speaking before a crowd. A week later, I delighted your Dad when I said I couldn’t find a description for what I was feeling inside except to…

Evangelicalism tore my family apart; death brought us back together — If I could trace the years of my childhood in the warm, Sacramento sun back to a single name, it would be R.J. Rushdoony — the father of Christian Reconstructionism, and, by many people’s definition, the strongest inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. In 1963, Rushdoony launched his ideas…