is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Posts by John Couretas
January 14, 2021
Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, eds.
University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. 392 pages.
English literature scholar Ed Ericson told a story about teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago to American undergrads, who knew plenty about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other dehumanized minorities but next to nothing about the genocidal history of the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes.
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July 16, 2020
In June, Columbia University’s Teachers College Center for Educational Equity and a group called DemocracyReady NY issued a report that called for New York state to take “immediate and decisive steps to require media literacy education in K-12 schools throughout the state.”
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June 02, 2020
When I first moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1986, the city was an alien place to me. I had grown up on the eastern side of the state, in the I-75 manufacturing corridor that runs from Toledo to Bay City.
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May 28, 2020
With the focus on COVID-19 shifting from the health emergency (easing) to getting the economy going again (glimmers of hope), it’s easy to forget just how good the economy was before the pandemic hit.
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May 01, 2020
Imagine you have just wrapped up another Earth Day celebration at your church (online only this year) and as long time chair of the Creation Care committee, you reflect on all the accomplishments: banning Styrofoam coffee cups and plastic bottles; mandating locally sourced and sustainably farmed organic food at all hospitality events; convincing your pastor to offer sermons and “climate blessings” provided by the mother church’s Social Justice office.
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April 22, 2020
The American healthcare industry is undergoing a massive stress test known as the coronavirus. For months and years to come, analysts will be issuing their opinions about just how well that industry performed under the incredible, sudden surge of the pandemic.
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April 10, 2020
We’re starting to have serious discussions about how and when to get our economy moving again. But like the medical response to the COVID-19 virus, the prospective economic cures are tentative, often conflicting and invariably contentious.
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April 02, 2020
At some point, not today but perhaps in the next few weeks, we will be having more conversations about getting people back to work and restoring the $21 trillion U.S. economy.
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March 17, 2020
Over the weekend, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that her office received 75 complaints of retailers gouging coronavirus-panicked consumers on the price of basic necessities:
Stores in Farmington Hills, Dearborn, Ann Arbor and Allendale have been accused of jacking up the price of hand sanitizers, face masks, and rice and lentils by up to 900%.
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March 04, 2020
Last week, a federal district court judge in Ohio declared that the city of Toledo’s move to establish a Lake Erie Bill of Rights, or LEBOR, was invalid. Judge Jack Zouhary put it this way:
Frustrated by the status quo, LEBOR supporters knocked on doors, engaged their fellow citizens, and used the democratic process to pursue a well-intentioned goal: the protection of Lake Erie.
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