Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, has been watching the growing demand for “safe spaces”—places where students won’t be challenged by ideas that aren’t liberal or radical—on college campuses. In 2015 he criticized this phenomenon in an online article (“This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!”) that quickly went viral and drew the attention of mainstream media. His new book on the same issue, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth, came out in August 2017. Here are edited excerpts of our interview in Los Angeles.

I have a confession to make: As a print journalist, I prefer to hide behind written words. I like to sit behind a laptop and stick words on page, so that readers can read those words in their own minds with their own voices—not mine.

Last week I experienced something that, based on my eight years of living in Los Angeles, is really quite extraordinary: Try as I might, I couldn’t spot a single homeless individual within 6 square miles.

February brings Valentine’s Day, and the Christian writer whose advice 21 years ago left lots of valentines unsent has revised his thinking.

Kenneth Ly sat on the couch with his girlfriend, watching Courageous with her, but his mind wasn’t on the movie. It was on his arm, which was down by his side but itching to slide across his girlfriend’s shoulders. Ly had been courting Katie for about five months, but still hadn’t dared touch her. Then three older men separately advised him to pursue her physically—some physical affection need not be sexual, they assured him.

My best friend in Singapore, Jingwen, was a Buddhist. I still remember the three incense sticks sticking out of a red altar by the door to her apartment. Sometimes, I would catch Jingwen’s grandmother step out of the house carrying fresh incense sticks, the tips glowing coal-red and unfurling a pungent, woody odor. She would hold the incense sticks up to her chest with both hands and bow before the altar several times, praying for luck and health. 

I must have walked past the Japanese Buddhist temple in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, several dozen times and never noticed it until the day I set up an interview with the temple priest there. That was in December, when I was working on a story about the Japanese Buddhist practice of observing memorial services for unborn babies (see “Guilt Offerings”).