John Tuttle

Among the many things that 2020 took from us, Chadwick Boseman was a big loss. In late August, news broke that he had died of colon cancer — a disease that hardly anyone knew he was battling.
Boseman’s biggest role was playing the titular character in Marvel’s Black Panther movie, and his legacy will certainly be long-lived. In fact, even after his death, he is still making headlines. In early December 2020, he received the Hero for the Ages Award at the MTV Movie and TV Awards. And in this y...

If good Star Wars stories are anything, they’re often intentional. Midi-chlorians in organisms allow some to have Force abilities. In the Clone Wars era, Palpatine’s plans are orchestrated with precision and with attention to some of the finest details, bringing about an elaborate militaristic onslaught. Anakin’s betrayal to the Dark Side comes with a reason, an allure of hope for keeping Padme safe. Luke intentionally seeks out Yoda on Dagobah in order to gain wisdom.

“Yet, despite the extremes we have confronted this year, there might be a way of turning away from this ‘great divide.'”
Putting it lightly, the past year has been a milieu of outbreaks—those of infectious illness and those which decried social and political agendas. It is a blunt statement, but it does not require much elaboration. We have all lived through it.

He ‘dismiss[ed] student perspectives that are different from his own’
Students and a state lawmaker are calling on the University of Central Florida to investigate an adjunct professor for referring to the novel coronavirus as the “Wuhan Corona virus.”
Some accused Alvin Quackenbush of “racist” grading practices, “biased” assignments and sharing his political views in class, but their criticisms also focus on disagreement with the grades the white professor has given.
Rep. Anna Eskamani, an a...

C.S. Lewis, a literary-bent mind if ever there was, had the habit of discussing other writers (and their influences on him) within his own stories. In Out of the Silent Planet, for instance, Dr. Ransom can’t help but envision the loathsome brutes of H.G. Wells’s fantasies while en route to the alien world of Malacandra.[1]
In Lewis’s The Great Divorce, another author of renown gets more than a mere mention within the story’s context. He is, in fact, an actor in it. The narrator bumps into thi...

Letters from Father Christmas
by J. R. R. Tolkien
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2020.
The name Tolkien is first and foremost associated with what is widely acknowledged as the man’s chief literary creation, The Lord of the Rings. The writer’s mind vibrantly fleshed out Middle-earth in history, in phonetics, in flora, and in verse. Certainly, there was rather little that his creation lacked. It became a realm as genuine in the reader’s eyes as it was in Tolkien’s.

For all those who have read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or have watched one of the plentiful screen adaptations, it is hard to be unmoved by Tiny Tim. So young and so full of the delight he gets from going to church, the little Cratchet boy might need crutches to walk, but he has wings on which his wonder takes flight.
The scene Dickens paints of Tim has him set in a place of love and affection within his family. But, as it is, sickness holds no partiality. Tiny Tim’s life is threatene...

Living in the Midwest, I’ve already seen the first snowfall of the season. There’s a nip in the air ushering in the twilight days of the year. With the encroaching close of the year, I’m confronted with many of the usual anxieties. There are final exams, holiday shopping, and food preparation, and a host of other responsibilities.
RELATED: Holding on to Hope This Winter Season
This year, there are also a number of considerations that I’ve never thought about before. Whose immune systems are p...

Over the years, many movies made reflect a growing trend amid studios looking to nab an easy profit. These are those productions that attempt to revive a classic tale or character but fail in attempting to make renowned intellectual properties both fresh and exciting.
Stories gravitating around figures like Mowgli, Robin Hood, or Sherlock Holmes feel like they’ve been done to death. I am happy to say this is not the sense one is met with in experiencing Jacqui and David Morris’astounding adap...

Imagine yourself in a helpless position, your wrists in shackles, which are – furthermore – fixed to a great stone pillar. As angry beasts are let loose from their containment, the dust gets kicked up. The shapes of the roaring creatures loom through the screen of airborne soil. A crowd cheers at the thrill of this pastime perceived as amusement to onlookers, turmoil to its actors.
Here’s a scene which, like a coin, has two sides. This could either be a scene similar to that of the mortal dem...

By Riley Funk and John Tuttle. This story originally appeared in the November 6th e-edition of The Circuit.
The 2020 Presidential Election has come to a head between the incumbent Republican President Donald Trump, and the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Linda Funk, an Atchison native, is no stranger to working the voting booth. Funk has been part of the local process for over 15 years. Regarding specifically the 2020 election, she expected this one to be different from p...

School officials claimed they ‘fail[ed] to convey a particularized message’
The Supreme Court has long protected student speech on public school grounds as long as it doesn’t “materially and substantially interfere” with the school’s operation.
Officials in two Wisconsin school districts came up with a novel way around the Tinker precedent: redefine what counts as “speech.”
A federal judge swatted down this move in a consolidated case brought by students whose gun-themed clothing was banned o...

For Benedictine College, this year’s campus-wide Homecoming celebration took a turn from what it has looked like in the past. Alterations in the annual festivities ranged from COVID- 19 precautions to new routes for the bed races.
The theme this year was “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” borrowed from the eponymous John Denver’s classic.
During Homecoming, the campus’s dorms and apartments found ways to personalize their on-campus housing identity and sport their school pride.
Benedictine alumni...

Paleontologists have revealed two separate fossils of embryonic tyrannosaurids. Dr. Gregory Funston of the University of Edinburgh recently detailed these specimens at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The two fossils – a foot claw and a lower jawbone – represent some of the youngest specimens of tyrannosaurs known to science. Both have been dated to 71-75 million years ago, placing these creatures' brief lifespans sometime at the tail end of the Cretaceous Period....