From the Editor (Spring 2020)

     We will all, I imagine, be happy to bid farewell to social distancing, but like so many adverse circumstances it has its own little secret gift: more time to read. This issue of The Torch, I hope, will give you something interesting to curl up with while you hunker down.

     Peter Mellette of the Richmond club gives us a rich blend of what both great literature and modern neuroscience have made of the phenomenon of memory in "Thanks for the Memories."

     Under the attention-seizing title of "Lincoln Did Not Free the Slaves," John Allen of the Kalamazoo club provides a fascinating look at the Emancipation Proclamation, the Constitution, and the always relevant question of what a president of the United States can and cannot do.

     Always relevant too is the topic taken up by Parker English of the Portsmouth club. "An African Hypothesis Regarding Fake News and Monotheists" discusses a celebrated African thinker's idea that monotheists tend to think they are right not just about their faith, but about everything in general. (Sound like anyone you know?)

     The great Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr.—Wisconsin’s "Fighting Bob"—may well have tended to think he was right about everything, but his record suggests he was at least right more often than most of us. His life and legacy are the subject of Fox Valley club member Kristin Stahl in "Robert M. La Follette, Sr.: A Man Worth Remembering."

     In "Foundations of Our Life Together," Donald Hanway of the Tom Carroll Lincoln club returns to our pages with thoughts on those things that, even in this era of sharp divisions, hold us together as a community.

     Finally, in the second of our classic reprints series, we have Paxton winner Leanne Wade Boern's "When 'Going Gentle Into That Good Night' May Be the Right Decision: The Case for Assisted Suicide," from 1997.

     Stay well!