The first few minutes for a visitor at a Trappist monastery are pretty special. The member monks and priests subscribe fully to the line of teaching that when Christ returns, He will present Himself as a stranger in need. You ...

Commentary: With few exceptions, the long-anticipated 12-month shutdown of I-40 through the middle of downtown kicked off last week with more whimper than bang. A simple malfunctioning signal caused the most noticeable backup after the closing. The loudest complaints, so ...

Commentary: Low-income housing does not mean poor people,” says Mercy Health Partners’ Metro CEO Jeff Ashin. He made the comment on WBIR the other day, addressing neighborhood concerns about the possibility that some portion of longtime North Knoxville landmark Saint ...

CommentaryThirty years ago, then-president Jimmy Carter boosted the fund-raising and building effort that led to Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair with a proclamation calling the city: “a splendid setting in which to explore new technologies to conserve energy, to harness the ...

Ordinarily, I don’t follow the news out of Oak Ridge, so if a friend hadn’t sent me a link to the article in the Oak Ridger, I might have missed out on a rather interesting development. A group of developers, ...

Over on the irreverent Internet forum KnoxBlab, the phrase “This Will Kill Downtown” is something of a running joke. It’s sort of an all-purpose punch line prompted by some people’s always imminent expectation of downtown’s demise once the tax money/drug ...

Two years after the abortive “Take Back Our Government” rally at the Expo Center formerly known as the Clinton Highway Lowe’s, Knox County’s voters seem well on their way to doing just that. The turnout on “Super Tuesday” was tremendous. ...

Whatever you do, don’t call it a convention center hotel. The proposed $78 million mixed-use development on the site of the old State Supreme Court building was announced last week with great fanfare. There were fancy renderings, a statement from ...

The train wreck that is Knox County politics is nothing if not entertaining. The latest installment, barring another blow-up before this goes to print, came last week during County Commission’s monthly Agenda Committee meeting. Commissioner Greg “Lumpy” Lambert all but ...

What should we change about Knoxville in 2008? Surprisingly, I’ve had a pretty hard time coming up with something, particularly with regard to my pet issues of downtown and center-city redevelopment.

Despite being one of the Southeast’s oldest state universities, you won’t find any buildings dating back to the University of Tennessee’s founding on campus. For starters, despite the 1794 date on its seal, UT didn’t move to its current environs ...

Joel Kotkin, columnist and author of The City: A Global History, has carved out quite a niche for himself critiquing the hip factor of urban development trends. In fact, his frequent lampooning of the supposedly latte-loving “creative class” shtick of ...