Yes, that’s all from one class, namely Thursday’s Enlightenment class.? After giving them a brief talk about revising research papers (that some of them, judging by what they’re asking me via email, have not yet started to write), we dove right into Descartes and his famous cogito ergo sum passage, continuing the discussion about knowledge [...]
I’m back in town from Toccoa, Georgia and from the “American Evangelicalism: Then & Now” conference that officially wraps up tomorrow but whose second day I won’t be attending, having to work at Bogart Library. My paper was in the second of a series of parallel paper sessions, and although I did face a rather [...]
First of all, my sophomore lit survey class proved again today just how bright they are–taking on a text that could not but be alien to them, they imagined their ways inside of it, and they made me look really good for Dr. Medine, who was observing my class for the sake of writing a [...]
Yesterday’s lesson on Sidney turned out better than I deserved. ?Because I’m more interested in intellectual history than I am in court intrigue, I’ve not spent as much time as I probably should have on Sidney’s works and biography. ?(O Reader, if only you could see the depths of the understatements in that last sentence.)? [...]
I’ll admit that I’m getting tired of my comp students’ not reading for class.? I knew, signing on to teach a required class in the spring, one that most folks take in the fall, that I’d not likely have the most motivated bunch of students I’d ever had.? But I’m growing weary. The texts today [...]
I’m aware that I could just be getting overly sensitive as I get closer to completing the Ph.D, but I’ve been thinking lately about all the folksy sayings there are disparaging teachers and comparing us to children.? Ten-year-olds on their MySpace pages know more about how computers work than do programming professors.? A child on [...]
When Mary and I returned from Indiana and West Virginia at the beginning of January, we started a new series on Exodus for the teens at church, and we decided fairly early on in the planning process that we’d do several weeks of lessons on the text (we ended up doing four), hitting the high [...]
A New Day for Intellectuals I’ll admit that I was one of the schmucks who didn’t see much changing about a month ago.? Certainly a great symbolic event was taking place, though I have my suspicions that, except for its happening in America, where we’re convinced that most of the really-good-and-important history happens here, it [...]
U.S. Congressman Phil Gingrey Kowtows to AM Radio Hosts Someone asked me recently if I’d heard about this incident, and I hadn’t.? So I read up on it.? And I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to cry. Apparently at some point around January 20, U.S. Congressman Phil Gingrey, from a district not far from [...]
Today’s English literature survey was a good one, but I don’t remember anything earth-shattering. ?We spent a good bit of time on Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” talking about the magical, anti-urban, anti-Puritan vibe of the piece, and we looked at a handful of Shakespeare’s sonnets. What I’ve been thinking about this afternoon has been my comp [...]
The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ I realize, now that I’ve read this book, that it’s possible to expect to be surprised, and when I read this book, I was surprised precisely where I expected.? The book itself is a compilation of essays, grouped thematically into a section exploring the new [...]
Whenever I teach John Donne, I always leave class feeling like I’ve communicated nothing but the incapacity of my own soul. In the abstract, I’ve read and agreed with theologies that say that there ought not to be, for the Christian, hermetically sealed compartments labeled “religion” and “desire.”? I’ve been in the Amen pew when [...]
As some of you no doubt know, I’m teaching a special section of freshman composition for the first time this semester, one on the writings of the Enlightenment.? Along with the Viking/Penguin Portable Enlightenment Reader (our main textbook), I’ve also assigned the class Neil Postman’s last book, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, a [...]
Thirteen years do make a difference.? When I was a nineteen-year-old church camp counselor and took C.S. Lewis’s short book The Abolition of Man with me to read during down times, I marked myself immediately as the most intellectual church camp counselor around and took C.S. Lewis, for the most part, to be the fount [...]
I remember what I did every year in high school on February 14–out came the black T-shirt (not that I was averse to the black T-shirt during the rest of the year), and whether I had a girlfriend or not (by my best reckoning, I was unattached three out of four years of high school–I [...]
Twenty-Five Sortof Random Things I Do and Don’t Believe I found this little not-meme on Internet Monk’s site, and since I participated in the less-interesting “25 Random Things About Me” meme on Facebook, I figured there wasn’t any reason not to take a shot at this one. I’d like to see all of my blogging [...]
I finally felt like I taught a genuine poetry lesson today–we covered modes of allusion, variations on persona, meter, rhyme, and all sorts of good English-major-type stuff.? We also took on a handful of poems from George Herbert, probably my favorite lyric poet (I can say that without supplanting my epics). We talked in some [...]
I found this meme on Michial Farmer’s blog, and lemming that I am… One book you?re currently reading: On the Bondage of the Will by Luther. One book that changed your life: The Peaceable Kingdom by Stanley Hauerwas. One book you?d want on a deserted island: I’m tempted to do the clever Chesterton thing, but [...]
Today we did Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, a lovely poem that I’d never read before planning the lesson for this class.? It’s a poem that at the same time gets 2 Samuel and ventures outside of its bounds freely to make whatever political point the poet was after.? The real glory of the poem for [...]
I’ve actually not taught a Sunday school lesson since 2008, and the break has been a nice one. I’ve been able to get more done on my own dissertation, get accustomed to the new courses I’m teaching at UGA, and help around the house and let Mary get her own graduate work done. That said, [...]
