The John Templeton Foundation recently asked more than a dozen leading scholars and public figures to write short essays responding to the question, “Does the free market corrode moral character?” Templeton also sponsored an event in London on this subject in early December, from which the conversation below is adapted.

What you see of 1990s-era America depends on where you stand.

Overcoming barriers to effective immigration reform.

Traveling with the Secretary of State can be fun (and games).

Some truths about the relationship between policymaking and intelligence.

The global dimension of the U.S. war on drugs needs downsizing.

Hollywood-produced movies like Kung Fu Panda paint Chinese culture in a positive light for all the world to see, which has Beijing wondering, “Why can’t we do that?”

Historians traffic in characters and plots. They appreciate the extent to which timing, location and personality matter. Anthropologists, on the other hand, eschew the importance of contingency, inadvertence and timing, treating humans like predictable atoms, not willful Adams.

Today there is a sizeable gap between elite and non-elite opinion on immigration reform. Time to cut through the fog of fear and moralizing dividing them.

This is not your grandfather’s Great Depression. It’s ours. And it will scar and mold and re-shape us in its own unique way.