A Blog on McConnell Center Life

Landon Lauder Class of 2017 I recently was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the World Affairs Council’s national conference, “America and the World 2015” in Washington, D.C. a couple of weeks ago. As you would expect from the broad conference title, it included quite a diverse array of topics, presented by panels consisting of national and international leaders in their respective fields. Topics such as education, US/Asia relations, the future of energy, and even cybersecurity, were discussed. While I could drone on and on about what specifically was discussed or this surprising statistic or that, I decided to instead use this experience as an important cornerstone on which my college experience—and thus my worldview—is being built. It is a shame most high schools tend to focus solely on domestic issues. We all had classes on American History, American Literature, and so on—but what about the rest of the approximately 6.7 billion people in the world? Have we som...

Alicia Humphrey, Class of 2017 To me, politics has always seemed to be a realm far distanced from the familiarity and visibility of everyday life. As a young person in a small town in Western Kentucky, I always wondered why people got so worked up about elections; my life never seemed to change, regardless of whether Bush or Obama was in office. I didn’t know who my Senators or Representatives were, and I didn’t really care. I didn’t even feel the need to vote, because I shared a cliché feeling that is nevertheless common among many young people: that my voice doesn’t matter. The only thing about government and politics that interested me was the Constitution, because it could be printed out, quoted, and directly applied. Elected officials seemed too distant to make a materialized difference. Even spending a summer in Washington, D.C. didn’t do much to change my apathetic attitude towards politics. Although I was so close to Capitol Hill and even visited the chambers of Congre...

Aaron Vance Class of 2017 Returning to The Abolition of Man this semester to refresh the memory of my initial encounter with C.S. Lewis, I am up taken with the concept of the man without a chest. As well, I am taken back to my original thoughts of the book, which to me seemed to be nothing more than a manuscript of the indoctrination of the Christian faith as it propagated the ideas of natural law and the works of Thomas Aquinas. This book was nothing more than an extension of the absolute philosophy that to me plagued the McConnell Center in every reading, and in every regard. A young progressive student in his first year of college, I sought to disparage these works, and to continue to service my desire for equality, my want to catalog, and to understand the natural working of the world. To understand why I cast my ballot in the primary was to be nothing more than an action of the chemicals of my mind, the reason religion existed was only to be an absence of science, and that t...

Diana Lalata Class of 2017 I woke up early Tuesday morning to drive thirty minutes to my designated voting destination. I arrived at the elementary school at approximately 8:00am, expecting to see long lines of cars in the parking lot and crowds of campaigners attempting to sway incoming voters one way or the other on Election Day. To my surprise, I was met with four other cars sitting on the curbside of the elementary school, appropriately parking in the NO PARKING zone by the school gym. I followed suit, and then marched into the school, with the expectation that there were more people in the gym than there were cars outside. I was wrong. I excitedly raced an elderly man to the empty check-in table (although with no competition since he did not seem to be as excited as I was to be voting in the midterm election). I stood in front of the tired and uninterested elderly woman working the check-in table. “Driver’s license?” she asked me dully. I frantically searched for my driv...

Jacob M. Abrahamson Class of 2017 Few things are as disappointing as the sudden loss in confidence you feel when you lose.  Especially when you thought you were going to win. That is exactly what happened to me and my partner in our first moot court competition at the University of Central Florida.  We had practiced and read case law for months and, despite some nervousness, felt great about our performance in the competition.  The three teams we faced were all talented and experienced, yet by the end of the night we felt the strength of our arguments would let us win at least enough votes to proceed to day two. Instead, we lost every ballot.  Some of them were close, but we always missed the mark.  As you can imagine, our initial reaction was some serious disappointment.  Yet our coach, Neil Salyer, did not seem too worried about our loss.  For one, our nationals-level team had moved on (and would go on to the final four of the tournament...