The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #154: Terministic Screens
Danny Anderson leads a conversation with Nathan Gilmour and Michial Farmer about Kenneth Burke’s essay “Terministic Screens.”
What Is Liberal?: A Response from Donald Lazere
[Correction notice: When Donald sent me this response, he asked that I change “Kenneth Burke” to “Edmund Burke.” I forgot to do so initially, but I have done so as…
What Is Conservative?: A Review of Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias
Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias by Donald Lazere 235 pp. Palgrave Macmillan. $95.00 Political labels can be funny things. I know I’m an odd bird in this…
Christian Humanist Profiles 17: Building a Better Teacher
Democracy, as a way of life, requires that the citizens of the democracy share an education in common, a set of stories and aptitudes and even experiences from which we…
My Colleague J.R.R. Tolkien: A Review of Tolkien’s Beowulf Translation
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien 425 pp. Houghton MIfflin Harcourt. $28.00 There’s a special kind of joy that fills the air when a…
What if Teaching Is a Science? A Bit of Conceptual Fiddling
I see the formulation all the time, but I rarely give it much thought. “Teaching isn’t a science. It’s an art.” “Teaching isn’t a science. It’s a craft.” “Teaching isn’t…
Am I Interdisciplinary?
Students had been saying it for years, but it wasn’t until this semester that I started wondering what it really means when students say I’m not a “real” English professor. Most…
Telos and Teaching: A Review of What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain
What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain Harvard University Press. 190 pp. Among Alasdair MacIntyre’s more famous claims is that every ethics presumes a sociology. Philosophies of human…
Freshman Composition, Service Learning, and Required Chapel
Some time ago (too long, really), our friend Todd Pedlar sent along a link to an interesting article about recent trends in Freshman Composition, “Look What Freshman Composition Has Become.” …
Memory, Theory, English Departments, and Christian Education
Professing Literature: An Institutional History by Gerald Graff Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education by Edward Farley I’m not sure how other folks entered into self-awareness of their…
The Christian Feminist Podcast, Episode 6.1: Christian Feminist Parenting
Note: This is our first transcontinental podcast, and there’s some noise and feedback we couldn’t get rid of. Thanks for sticking with us! Introductions Congratulations Shelah and Shawn! A little…
On Teaching Comedy Badly
I’ll admit right out front that my problem might have more to do with my inadequacies than with the nature of literary genre, but try as I might, I keep…
The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #114: Meno
General Introduction – Listener feedback – Episodes on Borges and Postman? Arête – Excellence and/or virtue – Warriors and excellences – Plato’s expansion of arête – Confucian virtue – Arête…
What’s in a Space?
At a faculty-development last week at Emmanuel College, my friend and colleague Tracy Reynolds, said, in passing, that when he meets with students, he prefers to go somewhere other than…
Old English, Programming, and the Liberal Arts
Learn to Code 1: Does Everybody Really Need to Program? Learn to Code 2: The Many Reasons We Must Program (and the Few Why Not) It’s easy to forget, if…