I gave my students a big old Middle English assignment over the weekend, all 2200 lines or so of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.”? I was surprised, frankly, at how little objection I got when I came to class this morning.? Some students found the ending depressing, and others felt like they were living in the marginal [...]
I have a feeling that at least one or two of my readers will take this occasion to shoot me a bit of mockery for writing about a comic book.? (I don’t figure all three of you will do so.)? No matter.? On my brother’s suggestion I put in a hold request for Art Spiegelman’s [...]
I read about T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers over on Jared Nelson’s blog a couple weeks ago, and the book sounded interesting enough that I laid down a few bucks and got a copy.? If you’re near a seminary library and can get a copy, check it [...]
It’s fun sometimes to introduce students to ideas that they’d already held but didn’t have names for, and the lights were going on as we took on Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of mischief-analysis as it pertains to legal questions yesterday.? Bentham is a bear to read, largely because he seems to imagine politics as an algebra [...]
Once again, I don’t feel like I taught an extraordinary lesson today, partially because of my selection of texts.? Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is a fun text, heavy on the storytelling and light on the allegory.? Although the moral philosophy is relatively complex even in its sometimes-cynical treatment of knights and chivalry, it doesn’t require a [...]
I taught what I think must have been my best philosophy lesson this semester yesterday. I’ve done better teaching writing, but the character of my comp classes is that I can stink one up while doing quite well on the other. That reduces my odds, the way I figure, of being shut out completely.? The [...]
I didn’t teach a great lesson today over Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but it was competent.? I suppose I should have expected to hit a rough patch after going straight from Anglo-Saxon poetry into Milton and then hitting the first text in which I’ve only had minimal coursework. I only assigned the first two cantos of [...]
Ruth is about three-quarters barking mad. Let me back up. ?Ruth, the eighth book of the Old Testament, is our text for the next several weeks of Sunday school. ?I’ve taught Ruth in churches and at UGA, and one of the things that I make a point of when I teach it is to note [...]
“English dictionaries are?collections of precedents, rather than official codebooks of meaning.” –Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Reader Over your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose
The Roar of the Crowd – ChronicleReview.com. I would normally start out a reflection on an article like this with an admission that I’m just as avid a sports fan as the next guy, but then I have to remember that, save a couple times when I’ve been up in Indiana with my brother or [...]
I asked myself the same after I finished my lesson in our Enlightenment class yesterday. The paper my students are writing this time around, as I mentioned a couple days ago, has my students attempting some Enlightenment-era questions in whatever philosophical idiom they find fitting. (If class conversations and their first couple papers mean anything, [...]
I finished a week of Paradise Lost today that went entirely too quickly. ?I know that some of the folks on the Milton-L listserv look with disdain on those Philistines who would teach excerpts from the poem without taking it from start to finish, but I think that my class gave my students a taste [...]
I’ll admit that I was preoccupied with other things when I taught comp yesterday, and I perhaps lost my patience.? But I do fear that my students’ failure (in most cases, I surmise) to read Postman yesterday might hinder them as they try to write the third paper, the most difficult one that I will [...]
I know this shouldn’t be this big an event (or perhaps it should!), but I taught my first lesson on Paradise Lost today.? It’s rather goofy, I admit, that someone who’s writing a dissertation heavily focused on Milton has taught college courses on Hebrew Bible, Plato, Boethius, Malory, the American Enlightenment, and speech (hey, I [...]
Okay, I just did. I saw Internet Monk’s post this morning about his “Evangelical Untouchables” project, and it just seemed too interesting.? I sent off a couple paragraphs this morning, and I suppose now I’m waiting for the results of yet another application.? I think that habit has become pathological. On the other hand, I [...]
Neoliberalism and Higher Education – Stanley Fish Blog – NYTimes.com. As I noted a few posts ago, I recently discovered the audio archive at Intercollegiate Studies Institute and have been listening to some of the lectures there.? I have a good number of friends, in the world and online, who call themselves conservatives, and encouraged [...]
I know full well, of course.? Adulthood swallowed half of it, and teaching ate the other half.? The first day of spring break I spent working my second job and driving Mary and Micah around (since we were down to one car until Wednesday, when I got my car back), and I spent the next [...]
So here I’m going to end my little series on division one of Being and Time.? If you’ve not had a chance to read them yet, here are the first four posts: Why Heidegger? There’s the World, and then There’s the World Formal Morality Truth As I look back over the last three posts, I [...]
I first read Norman Geisler in 1995 and heard well the trumpets’ call for Christians to rally behind “absolute truth.”? I hadn’t thought enough, back then, about the connections between scientific and philosophical language to ask what solvent might dissolve a solute truth, so without that snide remark in my arsenal, I became convinced, for [...]
Heidegger is at his most amusing, I think, when he denies what he’s patently doing. ?In Being and Time, influenced (if Hubert Dreyfus and Michial Farmer don’t lead me astray) by Kierkegaard and Buber, Heidegger does spend a fair bit of time talking about certain ways of Dasein?(being-there/existential being) that, despite his repeated denials of [...]
