“True, these principles sound pretty elementary — “we’re pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence” — but in the days since the pope’s sermon, I don’t feel that I’ve heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus.” I read this call for free speech and a free press, hallmarks of those liberal Ameri-Brits of the late [...]
There is nothing new under the sun. But you haven’t been around that long, cynic. There is nothing new under the sun. But you haven’t seen nearly as much, traditionalist. There is nothing new under the sun. But you stand on the earth under its light, not beside it as its brother. There is nothing [...]
I’m about to head upstairs to play the Puritan for my office mate’s surprise classroom production of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Typecasting? Probably. No matter; one has to love a play in which a Puritan loses a theological debate to a puppet, even if one doesn’t entirely dislike Puritans. I’m looking forward to digging back into [...]
We finished up our second Plato “unit” (actually just read enough pages to get to paper 2′s revision days) with a haphazard discussion of whether or not UGA students are somehow analogous to Plato’s guardians. Some folks seem pretty comfortable with the assertion that college students are there for self-improvement primarily, while others have some [...]
Discussion went well yesterday, though I should have planned better in both cases. We established that censorship can happen in all kinds of contexts and all kinds of reasons but did not have enough time in the end to explore the possibility of evaluating those acts of censorship. Ah, well. At least we got to [...]
Imagine that there’s a ring that turns one invisible, that one could do anything, moral or immoral, without being seen. (No, not even by the hellish bad guys in Lord of the Rings.) Now imagine that one had the resources to hire sorcerors, wizards who could by magic arts convince even the gods that one’s [...]
10 o’clock class was tired today. That or I’m just not connecting with their corporate personality the way I connect with 9 o’clock. However one slices it, my first discussion session went better than my second. Teaching Republic once again has me thinking about “western culture” as an abstraction and the alienness of the texts [...]
Friday (yesterday) we covered the rambling opening to Republic and the first salvos between Socrates and Thrasmychus. Once again, unlike the three-year-old comp anthologies, which always seem dated, my classes dug into the two-millennium-old debates about morality and power with a vengeance. As C.S. Lewis promises, the students have found this stuff, thus far, for [...]
