General Introduction
- Still in the decimals
- I haven’t the faintest idea
- What’s on the blog?
- Last man standing

Conservatism in The Office of Assertion
- Some background
- Conservative or old-fashioned?
- What should freshmen write about?
- Using Crider effectively
- What is interesting student writing?

Crider vs. Standard Freshman Comp.
- Discovery and persuasion
- The “O” word
- Rhetoric and dialectic
- Is there a middle ground?
- Truth as process and un-ignoring

Organization and Arrangement
- Immanent design
- How Crider helps us teach
- Assembly line writing
- Two models for draft meetings

Style
- Memorization and Delivery
- Clause Combination
- Style in other subjects
- How drafting saves time

Responsibility and Education
- How does The Office of Assertion work at Christian colleges?
- Vocational and liberal arts students
- The Office of Assertion and the Phaedrus
- Thanks, conservative youth ministers
- Tedious freshman relativism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Rhetoric. Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984.

Austin, Michael (ed). Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. New York: Norton, 2010.

Crider, Scott. The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005.

Plato. Gorgias. Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

—. Phaedrus. Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

—. The Republic. Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

• Tripp Fuller issues a manifesto on seminary education.
• Did you hear the one about the Hegelian who went to Saint Louis?
• An encomium for Stanley Fish
• The science of self-control (and why we should have listened to Homer)
• The historical ignorance, philosophical illiteracy, and right-wing politics of the nü atheism
• Depressing news on the research-1 university
• More depressing news on the research-1 university
• Why the research-1 university should have listened to Newman
• 

• In which a small college English teacher complains about high school English teachers and R-1 literature professors
• The ritual of meaningless questions and predictable answers
• 

• What does the devil look like?
• A message to parents: lighten up, enjoy life, and fire up that in-car DVD player! (link posted and labeled by Gilmour)
• On the bad business sense of closing university philosophy departments to make up for state budget shortfalls
• What we can learn from the Rob Bell unpleasantness.
• 

General Introduction
- In which we put Season 4 to bed
- David speaks in faith
- Listener feedback
- Looking for our most-distant listener
- We apologize for last week’s rabbit trails
- Nathan’s McLaren review fails to make significant waves
- How we plan to spend our summer vacation

Destroying the German University Model
- University as job-credential factory
- Academies vs. universities
- Research elevated over teaching
- The “Invisible Hand” mentality
- Over-specialization
- A disclaimer about the University of Georgia

Let’s Talk Teleology
- The history of the liberal arts
- Geographical specificity
- A helpful idealism
- Knowing a good bit about an awful lot

The Advantages of Majors
- The need for a center
- Transcendence and immanence
- The influence of graduate school
- The importance of the sciences

Core Curriculum
- Rolling the classes together
- The role of non-Western civilization
- Adding laboratories to the mix
- How would these classes be taught?

Student Spiritual Life
- Closing down the chapel on Sunday morning
- Chapel alternatives
- Small groups
- Burning out on church
- Chapel services for adults
- The priesthood of all professors

CHU Exclusivity
- Universities aren’t for everyone
- The ethics of open admission
- The admissions essay
- More work for professors
- Statements of faith for students and faculty

Sports!
- Professor/coaches
- Athlete/scholars
- Forced participation
- Why team sports are good for you

Potpourri
- The ideal campus
- Monastic architecture
- Aesthetics matter
- Breaking down the city walls
- Leisure-class faculty
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: Norton, 2010.

Milton, John. “On Education.” The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 226-236.

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1990.

• the art of theory, a recently-launched online journal of political theory (the inaugural issue’s roundtable on Adam Smith looks interesting)
• A call for more graduate students to study the history of philosophy
• What the Rob Bell circus is doing to normal, working preachers
• An online debate about teaching pop culture in writing courses
• 

General Introduction
- Sweaty technology
- In which we creep up on fifty
- Name-dropping with Nathan Gilmour
- Giving the listeners what they want

How English Departments Used to Work
- The rise and fall of rhetoric
- Charles Eliot changes everything
- Authors and periods and other literary matters
- The populist origins of Freshman Comp
- The pyramid scheme in English graduate programs
- Bad edit alert

Are Things Changing for Rhetoric?
- Weaver’s attack on the scientific man
- Self-expression and utter subjectivity
- The return of Gorgias
- The undervalued and purposeless rhetoric department

Language Is Sermonic
- The supreme confidence of the postwar generation
- The human being as composite
- Facts and opinions
- The movement of language
- Students’ disbelief in rhetoric

Classical Topics
- Abraham Lincoln defines humanity
- Definitions and essential reality
- Unwitting Weaverians
- Cause, effect, and circumstance
- Playing with logical fallacies
- Weaver’s mystical analogies

Arguments from Authority
- Grubbs vs. Weaver
- Why do students resist professional authority?
- And yes, we know we act like polymaths, too
- Wikipedia and authority
- Foucault hits pop culture
- A gratuitous shot at Brian McLaren
- Mainline bureaucracy

Taking It to Class
- Break down the silo
- Essays are persuasive
- And question your other classes
- Refining fallacies through topics
- Excellence in rhetoric

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cicero. The Nature of the Gods. Trans. Horace C.P. MacGregor. New York: Penguin, 1972.

Dante. Paradise. Trans. Dorothy Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1962.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. New York: Harper, 2010.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

Thomas Aquinas. A Shorter Summa. Ed. Peter Kreeft. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993.

General Introduction
- Nathan Gilmour watches from the stands
- What’s on the blog?
- The sad science of naming links posts
- Listener feedback
- Is anyone still listening?

Weaver and Plato, Redux
- Gorgias boasts—again
- How ultimate terms sway the masses
- What does charismatic mean?

God Terms and Devil Terms
- The movement and destination of rhetoric
- Progress as ultimate end of human existence
- Metanarratives, progressives and liberals
- Science! Science! Science!
- Prejudice and bigotry

Ultimate Terms and Politics
- Just try to analyze ‘em
- Unbuckling the word from the meaning
- Soundbite culture
- Patriotism: the last refuge of the scoundrel
- Live free or die

Religious God and Devil Terms
- Nathan Gilmour, the fundamentalist
- An ex-cathedra pronouncement re: religion
- Whose traditions?
- Why we’re all syncretists
- Nathan praises the Emergent Church for once

Let’s Talk Profanity!
- Thinkin’ ‘bout elimination
- Defecatory and copulatory inversion
- David Grubbs defends vulgarity

Can We Do Without Ultimate Terms?
- Why we need to talk about God, justice, and love
- Rhetoric needs a direction
- Analyzing the terms
A Practical Word to Freshman-Comp Teachers
- Educating on an individual level
- The Mr. Spock confusion riff
- The definition essay
- Legalizing marijuana, man
- Victoria’s undermining of ethnic slurs

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- Listener feedback

Plato Gets Hostile
- Nathan explains Weaver
- Why does Plato hate rhetoric?
- Structure vs. content
- What is pleasant and what is good
- Giving the sophists a bad name

Weaver’s Platonic Allegory
- Farmer gets insulting
- Interpretation of the performances
- Good lovers, bad lovers, and non-lovers
- Hook-up culture
- Divine madness and lovesickness
- The move toward something higher and better
- Is Weaver overly simplistic?
- The return to sophistry

Weaver, Plato, and the Soul
- Rhetoric’s proper effect
- The Divine Mind
- Rhetoric and dialectic
- Weaver’s philosophical relativism

The Discourse of Business and the Discourse of the Poet
- Is this dichotomy out of date?
- Shop talk and the pitch
- Official style
- Scientific histrionics
- Is flat rhetoric active or passive?
- Academic BS

Analogy and Truthful Exaggeration
- Talking about things that are not yet
- Richard Weaver reads Hebrews
- Why it’s important to define the good

Teaching Composition
- The problem with Freshman Comp
- Assigning Phaedrus
- How to use the dialectic of good in the classroom
- Sneaking it into nonsectarian schools
- Nathan’s Plato/Boethius class

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Frankfurt, Harry G. On BS. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2005.

Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and Walter Hamilton. New York: Penguin, 2004.

—. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Weaver, Richard M. Language Is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985.

• RIP John Shawcross, Milton scholar.
• How Top Gun killed the American movie.
• Jerry Salyer warns against (and admits the inevitability of) a knee-jerk Europhobia.
• Leonard Davis demonstrates the painful insularity of people whose academic worlds consist of only Research-1 schools.
• Fred Sanders and Lady Gaga?  Something is going to blow up here.
• A modern-day Nicodemus manages to hold Jesus’s radical message and Christianity’s radical grace in tension.
• On the right-wing politics of video games.
• Parchment and Pen gives a reasonable, sane introduction to the science of textual criticism. (Read this as an antidote to Bart Ehrman’s hysteria.  –NPG)
• John Stackhouse recommends some humility to those who want to “just do what the Bible says.”
• Our buddy Chris Gehrz isn’t the only stodgy white guy to try to rap.
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