Hardly the Last Word

October 2007 Here they are–Micah’s pictures from September and October.

The popular theology book to which I contributed an essay is now available for purchase. The other contributors, I’ve found, have far more hipness and rock star power than I have, but that’s not hard. Their blogs probably also get more readers. But enough of that. Click the link below to check out Out of [...]

We jumped a thousand years into the future today, landing squarely in the sixth century AD.? A class that lives, so to speak, in ancient Greece can make those sorts of jumps. We found at the end of our jump a man who did not so much contemplate Plato’s thought experiment about morality and consequences [...]

Colts vs. Pats: Good vs. Evil I really enjoyed this little article. Patriots at Colts on Nov. 4 is shaping up to be one of the most attractive and exciting NFL regular-season games ever staged. The pairing is fabulous; the teams are the league’s best; and there is a chance both will take the field [...]

We discussed Milton’s “On Education” today, and both classes did a great job seeing the stark differences between Plato’s highly specialized/aristocratic society and Milton’s strongly democratic notion that everyone should learn to farm, to fight, to litigate, to heal, and to read and write verse. I know it seems like all I do in my [...]

No, I’m not ending this blog.? You wish you could be so lucky… I’m just plugging Mary’s blog, The Last Word.? She claims in its description that her word is not the last.? I’m going to remain safe and diplomatic and not comment on that here.

I’ve been fiddling with my blog’s layout instead of reading Ben Jonson today, and I now have “now reading” devices in the margins.? The cover images require Java, which WordPress doesn’t support, but the links are direct links to my LibraryThing.com account, and besides that, I figured out some of the html myself instead of [...]

We’ve had our peer revision day, and so far, the papers I’ve discussed with students look promising.? Those papers at the very least seem to be taking seriously the variety within premodern and early modern thought and exploring some of that variety with regards to some social division.? Of course, it’s seldom the students who [...]

I think I named this post the same thing last year.? Ah, well.? If the name is a good one, why not stick with it? My brave students finished up with Plato’s baffling reincarnation chapter yesterday. ? I was sure to wrap up each group’s discussion with an explication of the allegorical import: every day [...]

For the second time in about five years, I heard today a preacher (this time on the radio–don’t know his name offhand) hold up Joseph’s actions in Genesis 47 as good actions.? The sermon was on around 9:30 when I was driving to work at Bogart Library.? The NRSV text reads thus: 13?Now there was [...]

Torture on TV, Bad Interrogation in Iraq I heard this the other day on NPR’s Fresh Air, and it reminded me again that those who claim to be tough-guy “realists” often miss the reality of a situation. The interview, twenty minutes of which I caught while running errands, indicates that the culture of military intelligence [...]

Yesterday we covered that bit of Plato that always makes me check the book’s cover and make sure it’s Plato and not somebody far more modern.? (I also tend to think, upon reading it, that Freud plagiarized it.)? Plato, having detailed how cities and people governed by intellect, by passion, and by productiveness operate, sets [...]

We covered some safer ground, relatively speaking, in today’s classes.? First up was the single most famous bit of Republic, the allegory of the cave.? I’ve got my cave talk (and chalkboard diagram) down so solidly that it felt like second nature.? We talked about the principle of analogy not only between the cave and [...]

I haven’t watched either game in the Arizona series, and I don’t plan to watch tonight.? If they go deeper than this round, I might consider talking Mary into taking Micah for a few innings, but so far, reading about their impotence in the paper has been much better for my health.

I got to teach perhaps my favorite Republic lesson today, the one in which I take on the persona of Plato and go after democracy.? And as in previous classes, the reactions varied from students who got mad, students who looked betrayed, and students who started to think that perhaps democracy wasn’t so great. As [...]

I typed this post once, but the UGA main library’s shady Internet connection lost it forever.? Ugh. I didn’t post about Tuesday’s classes because I was grading, and I think that was a mistake.? I’m going to try reconstructing some of the things we talked about even though I’ve already taught my 8:00 section today. [...]

Well, we were Adelphia Cable customers for a year and a half, happily paying our nine bucks a month for basic cable. Then Comcast bought out Adelphia a few months ago. I got the notice today that they’re now charging me fourteen bucks a month for the same network channels.? The fifty-dollar-a-month packages didn’t go [...]