Opinion

What's up with wages? Nothing, and that’s a problem (not a puzzle)

Increasing inequality is a pressing problem requiring serious research and vigorous debate as we strive for policies that improve people’s opportunities and outcomes. One direct way to tackle this challenge is to confront the problem of pay, especially in the United States, where our public culture has long correlated hard work with personal worth and our public policies have wedded social benefits to employment via tax credits, health care insurance and pensions.

In defense of immorality

LeBron is a sports icon

Braving the rain

Observer Editorial: Revoke McCarrick’s honorary degree

Puzzling summer

The atlas of beauty

The politicization of free speech

Ranking the campus' breakfast sandwiches

A simple way to honor our nation's heroes

In Notre Dame,

Dear Father Jenkins: let us practice what we preach

Tune in to 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit'

Zahm in outrage when hot girl becomes nun

Education inequality

The death and resurrection of poetry

Encouragement from an ND alumna

Those pearly gates

The (dis)honest guide on how to fit in at Notre Dame

'To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before': A review

Ten reasons why you should bike to school

According to the Oxford dictionary, ‘universal’ is defined as “the quality of involving or being shared by all people or things in the world; the quality of being true in all situations.” Nowadays, everyone thinks that society is marching toward universal progress. The advances of science, democracy and Amazon.com, they claim, are making more liberty and happiness available to all people in all situations. Are they really? If the words of St. Mother Teresa are worth any consideration, she sees our culture headed in a different direction: “The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.” It’s called the universal fallacy: narratives of progress and modernization, rather than elevating all of humanity to its universal ideal, levels culture to a particular flavor of mediocrity.