Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson decided last week that he would try to clarify to the pope what the Bible says on immigration. This was in response to Pope Leo XIV and U.S. Catholic Bishops’…

More than a year after the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the economic aftershocks of the disaster still permeate the lives of the people who survived it.  Fewer than a dozen homes in some of the…

I wore my Timberlands last week. They’ve always been one size too big. When I was in Washington, D.C., in 2014, they were part of the uniform for my AmeriCorps program, City Year, an AmeriCorps…

It was the most consequential camping trip in American history: In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, asked the naturalist John Muir to guide him into the wilderness of California’s Yosemite Valley.  After three days…

It was good to have Derek Schmidt in Iola last week. Thanks go to County Commissioner John Brocker for inviting Schmidt to visit the town’s industries and businesses for the better part of the day.…

This week, President Trump called on his party to nationalize American elections, an unconstitutional move that he said would be justified because of the danger of noncitizens casting ballots. “These people were brought to our…

I worked as an internal-medicine physician for 31 years. Then, about two years ago, my supervisor called me into her office and fired me. I was forgetting instructions and struggling with technologies I had always…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reportedly issued a memorandum that authorizes its agents to enter private residences forcibly without a judicial warrant.  James Percival, the general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, recently defended…

The arrest and detention of Liam Conejo Ramos, the Minnesota 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack, has drawn the attention — and the ire — of the nation. As an immigration…

In the epilogue of “Kansas Matters: 21st-century Writers on the Sunflower State,” which I co-edited with Thomas Fox Averill, I wrote that Kansas is “a place wild with stories, overrun with strange and unexpected creatures,…