Academia. Is. Dying. And we’re all watching helplessly, as though its malady is like a case of Alzheimer’s, and there’s nothing we can do but watch it deteriorate, wait until it forgets us, and welcome death as nothing other than a release from pain and grief. It is dying because it is at war with […]
I was as disturbed as anyone tracking the reports of the “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, VA over the weekend. Disturbed by the shouted slogans, the violence, the anger, the typically disturbing imagery of swastikas, confederate flags, and automatic weapons displayed alongside American flags. All that was sickening enough. But then I noticed something […]
Note: if you’re new to this series or to plain-text writing in general, please refer to Lesson One of this series to get started. As I mentioned in the previous lesson, one of the biggest pains for me in academic writing is dealing with what happens to footnotes and citations in Word documents over the course […]
In two more weeks, I end my post-heart-surgery medical leave and go back to doing what I love the most: being with students, teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare, and studying the literature and culture of medieval Britain. It’s going to be a bit of a transition after three months of focusing on healing, so I’ve been […]
A few weeks ago Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, released an open letter addressed to his university’s student body. In the letter, Piper appeared to take on the issue of “victimization” culture, railing against a student who apparently objected to the content of a sermon at one of OKU’s chapel services. A number […]
To put a particular definition of marriage at the heart of the Gospel is to make a dangerous innovation on traditional Christian thought. To put a human construct in a place that only Christ has the right to occupy. The Gospel has never been a moral code, and has never been about anything human beings do. To replace that traditional idea of the Gospel with a moral code based on one particular (and arguable) interpretation of only a few passages of Scripture is, to my thinking, an offense against the Gospel, not a preservation of its witness.
I was struck recently by A New York Times column by Frank Bruni, an individual of a kind of rhetoric that’s become a species unto itself in recent years: laments about the state of the “humanities” in contemporary universities. I found myself agreeing with many of Bruni’s broadest points but questioning most of the particulars […]
surfingedges 