“Adulting is hard.”
On many occasions I’ve heard that all-too-common phrase interposed with dread over a long to-do list or alongside the stress that comes with one too many responsibilities. In many ways, that is a fair assumption to make about adult life—as adults, there are so many things to be responsible for that sometimes it feels like it’s all we can do just to reach the bare minimum. It’s as if, at any moment, we won’t be able to stay on top of everything anymore and we’ll be deemed irresponsible or inadequate.
Read moreWeird. Different. New Normal. Get Back to Normal. Unprecedented. Socially Distanced. Close Contacts. Masks. Cancelled. Postponed. Disappointing. Stay Faithful. Done with COVID-19.
This is not an article to rant about COVID-19, or a charge to implore people to stay strong and bear with it all. This is just an account.
Read moreIn my experience, men have no conception of what it is to be a woman. No matter how hard I might try to explain it, they cannot imagine the way we walk through the world and the vast and shocking difference in the things we are forced to think about and do on a daily basis, and for our own safety. Recent experiences in my life have led me to an almost uncontrollable need to speak on the topic of violence against women. While it is something I have been forced to think about for a long time, it really intensified at the death of Sarah Everard.
Read moreI think just about every student here has either asked or been asked how they were doing, and the answer was “busy” or “tired.” Especially as the end of the semester gets closer, it seems like there is never enough time in the day to get everything done, and motivation and sleep are high on the list of things we always want but never seem to have enough of. When all of this is compounded with a high level of stress, it’s hard to carve out time to invest in other people, leading us to isolate ourselves in either our own personal worlds or the worlds connected to our screens.
Read moreOne year ago, the world began to shut down because of COVID-19. A year later, Covenant College remains shut down much to the same degree as when the crisis began. School officials have consistently stated that they are working to return things to normal, and that no significant issues have held up the effort.
Read moreIt has been a little over a year since we were sent home due to the coronavirus pandemic—the email was sent out on 12 March 2020. For many of us, quarantine was a time to slow down and think about life: what do we value, what do we miss and what do we honestly not care about that we thought we couldn’t go without? It was a time that many people began or went back to hobbies like gardening, painting, home improvement projects and the like.
Read moreThis verse inspired the title of one of my favorite albums—“A Mirror Dimly” by Citizens—and also offers one of the most profound hopes I've ever tried to wrap my head around. However, since we have pretty great mirrors in this century, the impact of the metaphor never actually hit me until this last year, when a significant amount of my relationships went through the wringer of video calls.
Read moreIn 1946, a man named John Biggins created the first cashless credit system that allowed customers at his bank to pay local merchants through their account rather than with cash. Since then, America has progressed towards ever more cashless methods of payment. Physical currency was designed to represent wealth and ease bartering. Beginning with precious metals as coinage with actual value, money progressed into a representation of the precious metals through the use of clad coinage, and, eventually, paper money alternatives. Many view cashless systems as the next step in the process of monetary evolution. Cashless systems, however, may mean the loss of freedom and privacy, and open an easy path for totalitarian control of the people.
Read moreWhat is the point of law? We have systems put in place to protect people and serve justice, but what happens when those systems fail to serve the people they aim to protect? What happens when those systems are built upon the false pretense that one life is more valuable than another? How should these systems be reformed? How do we respond when a human mistake costs someone their life?
Read moreI think all of us, at some point or another—whether we’re sitting in our rooms, going about our day or even in a big group of friends—have had that nagging feeling of loneliness that just doesn’t seem to go away. One of the most frustrating parts of feeling lonely is that it’s a situation that people rarely seem to address, and the fact that we are often too embarrassed to say we are lonely contributes to us feeling even more lonely than we did in the first place.
Read moreKarl Marx’s critiques of capitalism died in the 1980s with the fall of the USSR and the move in China towards a more free-market economy, or so it’s been said. Marx’s predictions about capitalism are alive and well today, however, and not in the way you might expect. It's not in the “radical” left and their socialist plots; it’s not hiding away in the Scandinavian nations; and it’s not even in a supposed "Chinese push for world dominance". Rather, Marx's theories, almost unchanged from their original conception, are alive today in every major capitalist nation.
Read moreIn last issue's "A Rebuttal of 'Capitalism was Built for Dictatorship,'" Kyle Kraus uses China as an example of a command economy to support his argument. This is problematic because China is not a command economy.
Read moreIn the last issue of The Bagpipe, an article written by Elias Vedders addressed the topic of capitalism and how the only way to truly achieve this ideal was to accept dictatorship. Vedders’s article can best be summed up by its final sentence, which stated, “...if we want capitalism to perform at its peak, perhaps it’s time to give dictatorial regimes a second chance.”
Vedders argued that society is held back by the fact that experts aren’t allowed to dictate policy without interference from the public. The masses, Vedders argued, “simply cannot know everything.” Dictatorship, though, can solve these problems, and reach a higher form of capitalism. While his logical reasoning is sound, Vedders based his points on faulty assumptions.
Read moreLast semester, an eager previewer asked a question that caught me off guard: “What would you change about Covenant?” This earnest question from a high school senior terrified me not only because that is such a difficult question to answer authentically in front of a hundred previewers, parents and admission counselors, but also because that was the very question I pestered students with on college tours four years ago.
Read moreWith the announcement of the Golden Globes winners on the forefront of the mind, opinions about whether or not the nominations were given to the best choices sit on everyone's lips. Whether the opinion is which director was snubbed or which TV show or movie deserved better, one movie in particular did not deserve any of the nominations that it received.
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