Must science declare a holy war on religion? — latimes.com.
As with most controversial, cable-news-type questions, I’m not dogmatic enough in either direction to please the folks whose fight this really is.? Nonetheless, I thought that the ending of this little article was interesting–it does give one pause to think that old Chuck himself was inclined [...]
Can a Machine Change your Mind?
I love discussions of mind and brain–they’re some of the sites of the most interesting philosophical work that I’ve seen. I took a History of Psychology class at Milligan, and as a young philosophy major, I thought I’d hit a vein of gold for reflection–every age that takes on the [...]
Free Market Faith
I finished this article scratching my head.? The author is a British atheist and editor of the Economist, and his praises for the pragmatic benefits of religious pluralism fit nicely with that sort of free-market ideology:
Consider the United States. It is both the most modern and one of the most religious countries in [...]
Endpaper – Fiction reaches a new level
I’m not sure whether to laugh or to cry.
Better yet, I’ll just wait until I can get it cheap on eBay.
ROTC and the Future of Liberal Education
First, before I forget it, how great is it that the president of Harvard is named Faust?? That’s a goldmine for newspaper headlines as far as I’m concerned.? “Budget Cuts Call for Faustian Bargains.”? “Has Harvard Sold its Soul?”? One could go on all day.? I suppose the only [...]
How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds – WSJ.com.
I might have to check this book out this summer.? Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?, according to this review, seems to take some of the psychological studies that educational theory stays away from and attempts a different sort of educational psychology.? I’m not surprised that WSJ [...]
The New Atheists? Easter message? ?Grow up or die? | spiked.
It’s always nice to read a bit of complex thought, especially when proponents of us-versus-them have been pounding away at a division of the world into… us and them.? Right.? I already said that.
At any rate, I’ve never read anything else by O’Neill, but judging [...]
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 my [...]
How Radio Wrecks the Right
As many of my readers no doubt know, I was for the period of a year and a half or so simultaneously a contributing writer for the blogs Christian Feminism and Conservative Reformed Mafia.? (The former still exists formally, but my post last August has been the last one that I’m [...]
Reblock Yourself the Polly Frost Way!
There’s not much to say about this aside from it’s really funny.
I moved to Sedona, Arizona, and once again began to focus on my own creative work. Easing back into my own true nature, I had sketched out a temporary title for my novel and had settled on an author [...]
Impasse at MLA
Folks who have read my material over at the Conservative Reformed Mafia know that I agreed to participate in an experiment with J. Wizzle (a screen name, of course) in which we both reviewed David Horowitz’s Indoctrination U, he from the perspective of an undergraduate student and I from the perspective of a [...]
The Great Divide
I’m not an anthropologist and have had reservations, about which I’ve written here, about anthropology as a discipline.? That said, this little essay is making me realize that what I’m concerned about might reflect a division among anthropologists about what the discipline itself is about.? Discussing the rise of evolutionary anthropology, Tim Ingold, [...]
Learning for Everyone
Not a profound essay, but an interesting bit of American popular history.? I knew that the Great Books movement started in the early twentieth century at Columbia and Chicago, but I never knew about its appeal outside of universities:
The Great Books craze began in the early 1940s in Chicago, expanding from Hutchins’s university [...]
The Thinker
I ran into this little piece on ALDaily, and it reminded me once more that what I’m doing, if I stick to doing it, is a worthwhile way to spend what years I’ve got left breathing air.? The best thing about this report is the end, in which Kelly Jolley, the philosophy professor in [...]
What Makes People Vote Republican?
I’m never sure what to think about anthropologists–on one hand, at least they’re trying to understand what some people wouldn’t.? On the other, I wonder whether they ever actually ask the people involved what they think is going on rather than just narrating from on high.? This article, though it makes [...]
Are you Going Forward?? Then Stop Now.
Of course, being part of academic and church cultures, the first thing I thought when I read this is how suitable it would be for somebody to do an analogous piece on each of those places and their particular brands of groupspeak, but of course, I’m too busy, so [...]
No time to think?
I was reading around as the library day wound down, and I stumbled upon this little piece on Arts and Letters Daily. (You didn’t think I found these little Internet nuggets on my own, did you?) I don’t have any major critiques of it, just a moment of gratitude to [...]
Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn?t as smart as it thinks
Yes, I know I post a fair number of articles about the Internet generation. (In fact, I just created a category, and I’ll likely spend some time reading back over the last couple years and back-tagging them.) But this one jumped out [...]
Prospect Magazine’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals
I have to be honest that I haven’t heard of most of these people. I suppose my diet of almost exclusively English-language texts might have something to do with that. Or the fact that even against my better instincts, I have become a specialist of sorts.
“Don’t Cry for Pinochet”
His embrace of economic reform seems unlikely to have sprung from a commitment to freedom, given the overarching contempt for liberty that characterized the rest of his government. Rather, in order to insulate himself from the consequences of his murderous seizure of power, Pinochet sought out political allies, and his free market [...]
The Christian Humanist Podcast