I’m not Charlie, and I’m not Sure I Aspire to Be
I won’t rehearse the details of last Wednesday’s attacks on the office of Charlie Hebdo, a Parisian satire magazine. Those anyone can find with a Google search. I do write, however,…
Christian Humanist Profiles 22: Reading Backwards
To be saved means to be in a story where the characters need saving. That ground-floor reality motivated a generation of theologians and Bible scholars to think of Christianity in…
Jesus for a Certain Kind of Modern Mind: A Review of Christ Actually
Christ Actually: The Son of God for a Secular Age By James Carroll 284 pp. Viking Penguin. $30.00 James Carroll tells a story of two wars against the Jews, two…
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…
A People Ruled by a King: A Review of Kingdom Conspiracy for Brazos Bloggers
Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church By Scot McKnight 255 pp. Brazos Press. $21.99. If the Kingdom is everything, the Kingdom is nothing. That’s the…
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…
The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #152: What Is Enlightenment?
Nathan Gilmour leads a discussion with Michial Farmer and Danny Anderson about Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?”
Wittgenstein Wednesdays, Section 4: Philosophical Investigations Sections 87-139
Series Index Once again I’ve waited until the day that Emmanuel College’s Wittgenstein group meets to write the latest blog post. It’s November. Give me a break. As with previous posts, numbers refer…
The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #149: Dead Poets Society
Nathan Gilmour converses with Michial Farmer and David Grubbs about Dead Poets Society, the second of our Robin Williams trilogy. The trio takes on the strange, truncated readings of poetry…
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…
The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #148: The Fisher King
Mea Culpa: In this episode, I (Michial) say that Amanda Plummer is British. In fact, she is the daughter of Christopher Plummer and is therefore American/Canadian. I still hate her…
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…
The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #147: H.P. Lovecraft
David Grubbs gets spooky with Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour as the trio discusses the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Conversations range from literary influence to biological racism, with some…
Wittgenstein Wednesdays, Section 3: Philosophical Investigations Sections 53-86
Series Index Emmanuel College’s Wittgenstein group meets today, which means I’m behind on getting the latest blog post up here. So it goes. As with previous posts, numbers refer to section numbers,…