There once was an elderly gardener who loved nature. She spent much of her time outside her tiny cottage, tending a beautiful garden filled with many colours, shapes, and sizes of plants and flowers. There was one part of the garden, however, right in the very centre, which did not easily yield growth. According to… Read more »

Communities are dying. Right here in Canada. It’s an interesting paradox in our world that while communities die in a literal sense in war-torn countries as well as third-, fourth-, and fifth-world countries, those of us in first-world countries are suffering a death that is much more subtle and in some ways catastrophic–we die a… Read more »

Having relatives in Europe, I’ve always been a bit closer to European history and World War II (WWII) than most North American youngsters. I grew up hearing stories about communism, deportation to Siberia, and fighting in WWII. At about age 12, I visited Auschwitz and heard horrifying stories from my grandparents. My grandpa, a modest… Read more »

There are two friends that I have, both of whom I admire and respect, who are entirely different in terms of socio-political outlook. One of these friends is an adamant peace-insisting individual who organizes national rallies in opposition to war. The other friend recently returned from an eight-month deployment in Kandahar, has worked in the… Read more »

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.” — from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2) Juliet makes this observation in Romeo and Juliet, wondering aloud what intrinsic value a name truly holds. Shakespeare therefore, through Juliet, brings up an interesting point. Does… Read more »

We’ve all heard the idiom, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Generally, we understand it to mean that what one person may find beautiful, another one might not. The implication is, then, that beauty does not exist except in relative worlds. I consider this implication too dismissive. Even so, it is true that… Read more »

I’m sure many parents have come upon the same realization as I that, with your children, you should not put too much emphasis on “being good” or “being bad,” because when it comes down to it, everyone is a combination of the two. We are human with good tendencies and bad tendencies and this distinction… Read more »

For centuries, philosophers have debated the definitions of various objects. Take trees, for instance. Plato believed in an ideal tree. All other trees attempted to imitate the ideal tree (thereby unifying the concept of a tree). Later era philosophers argued that the concept of a tree is a composite of all the trees we have… Read more »

I believe it was Bernard Shaw who said “As it is impossible to say exactly what one means, it follows that it is impossible to mean exactly what one says.” Aside from using this statement as a defense when someone misconstrues your declarations, it provides a good deal of insight into a question that I… Read more »

Our newest contributor, Pam focuses on philosophical musings and inquiries into the nature of how humans learn and categorize things. This article, however, focuses on a very common theme here at AU – the balance between caring for children and continuing education. With the AUSU Student Mom’s Club boasting more members than any other club,… Read more »