Thomas H. Groome writes something to the effect that a very important aspect of education is time, that we are pilgrims in time, and that responsible pilgrims remember to initiate those who have had less time on their pilgrimage. Niebuhr focuses on a Christian interpretation for a history that will not demand we progress into [...]
Tags: Education, Love, philosopher gardener, spanish
I have experienced far, far too many writing courses. When I was homeschooled for a while in high-school, I read dozens of books on How to Write — How to Write Essays, How to Write Stories, How to Write Poetry. I read Zinsser’s book on non-fiction, Gardner’s book on fiction, and Williams’s book on style. [...]
Tags: american rhetoric, edgar allen poe, famous writers, how to write essays, how to write poetry, john updike, robert louis stevenson, samuel johnson, sir thomas browne, strunk and white, wordsworth, writing courses, writing process, zinsser
Next semester, for the first time, I will be taking no literature courses. (I will be taking a short story writing class, but that doesn’t count.) I have three complaints to make against literature classes.
First: literature classes seem to be designed for people who don’t read. This semester, during a particularly inane session of Early [...]
Tags: copernican revolution, early american literature, Epistemology, hack work, intellectual history, introductory essay, literature classes, literature courses, literature professors, literature students, modern british literature, narrative ideas, profs, scarlet letter, theologians
The remarkable Jewish polymath Maimonides first stated his theory about teaching mysteries in his Commentary on the Mishnah. This work is, historically, the first total summary of Jewish law embracing both the content of the Torah and also its commentators. In the second part of his introduction to this work, Maimonides discusses the haggadah—the homiletic [...]
The time has come to write my sample essay for graduate school applications. I’d like to take it as an opportunity for substantial theological work that will—I hope—successfully involve careful historical theology, exegesis, and personal theological reflection.
The topic I’m going to write about is Sickness & Theology. There are three possible relationships here, I think:
Special [...]
Tags: Calvin, devotions upon emergent occasions, graduate school applications, historical theology, john donne, sample essay, second birthday, Sickness, theological reflection, theologies, Thesis, william stringfellow
(The following is an extract from an essay published in Crossings, an intellectual journal on the Dordt campus.)
How shall I describe education—the process of obtaining access to a tradition and power to extend it?
Imagine the tradition one desires to be educated into as a huge, over-populated city—at Dordt, a tradition of Christian humanism, as well [...]
Tags: Books, characterization, christian humanism, crossings, eschaton, fragmentation, future students, Helmut Thielicke, intellectual journal, kingdom of god, malcontents, marvelous city, portals, psyches, representative figures, william stringfellow
“Tis those whose cause my former booklet pled
Whose zeal to learn has wrought this tome instead.” — John Calvin
One of the most fascinating things about Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is the history of its slow accretion of content from a simple four part booklet to a voluminous tome. One aspect of the Institutes [...]
Tags: compass, couplet, evolutions, institutes of the christian religion, irony, john calvin, persecution, piety, posterity, protestant revolution, roman church, Theology
A few days ago I finished the intriguing memoir of P.D. Broughton entitled Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School. Broughton attended the school in 2004-2006. He describes the roundabout path that led him to it: a distinguished career in journalism that left him, not unfulfilled, but unwealthy. To remedy this condition, [...]
Tags: After Virtue, Ahead of the Curve, astonishing truth, Books, cambridge massachusetts, harvard business school, harvard mba, harvard model, macintyre, managerial expertise, moral behavior, Philip Broughton, Virtue
This is the first part of a series about Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The series is introduced here.
I first encountered Meditations in a film called The Corn Is Green. Katherine Hepburn plays an altruistic school-mistress who moves to the Welsh country-side to educate miner’s children. She discovers one young miner who turns out to be brilliant. [...]
Tags: central insight, corn is green, katherine hepburn, marcus aurelius, meditations, noble character, piety, progress in education, vote of thanks
