This existential crisis is less about technology and more about morals and will
Archives for 2023
A letter to my freshman self
A couple years ago, when my nephew set off for college, his father (my brother-in-law) asked many of us to write a letter to our freshman selves stating what advice we’d give to ourselves if we could communicate through time. […]
The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity
Here is a taste of Caitlin Flanagan’s recent piece at The Atlantic: The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for […]
An introduction to Antonio Gramsci
The Italian communist was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th-century. If you are new to Gramsci, Mark Engler and Paul Engler’s piece at Dissent is worth your time. Here is a taste: Too often, mainstream political analysts […]
What is your AI policy? A Penn professor explains why he doesn’t have one.
Everywhere you turn these days professors are talking about how to handle students who use ChatGPT to write their papers. Over at The Washington Post, historian Jonathan Zimmerman explains why he doesn’t have a policy on the matter. Here is […]
“Not every title can be ‘electrifying’, ‘essential’, and ‘revelatory.'”
Over at The Atlantic, Helen Lewis addresses the practice of book blurbs. Here is a taste: And that reveals another dirty secret of the blurb: They’re not addressed to you. “The biggest thing to understand is that blurbs aren’t principally, or […]
REVIEW: Homo Legens
Can we move beyond an instrumental approach to reading?Â
Ideas in progress: David McFarland on the teaching life
David McFarland leads a busy life, to use an understatement. He is a high school humanities teacher at Pacific Academy, an IB World School in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. He teaches Social Studies, IB History and Theory of Knowledge, and […]
Trump’s 2024 calendar
It’s going to be an interesting year. CNN has mapped it out: January 15 – E. Jean Carroll civil defamation trial begins; Iowa caucuses January 23 – Possible New Hampshire primary February 8 – Nevada caucuses February 24 – South Carolina primary February […]
Commonplace Book #280
American socialists, like all Christian socialists, had to cope with the fact that socialist rhetoric about abolishing capitalism evoked fears of class war and proletarian smashing. Christian socialism, wherever it took root, sought to mitigate this threat. Marxists, radical democrats, […]
The American Historical Association responds to the Florida African American history standards
Here is AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman: The Florida Board of Education approved new standards of instruction in African American history on July 19, 2023. A firestorm of protest erupted immediately from a range of public figures (including the vice president of […]
Reading Banned Books for the Love of God
Lectio divina in an age of censorship
Reflections on Russell Moore’s Losing Our Religion
If you have spent any time in evangelical circles, Russell Moore requires no introduction. A former professor and dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he was for eight years the President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious […]
Trump’s court trials are his campaign
This morning we learned that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled Donald Trump’s election interference trial to commence on March 4, 2024. The next day fourteen states will hold GOP primaries. This day is often called Super Tuesday and […]
The books John McPhee never wrote
92-year-old John McPhee talks to the Commonweal podcast about his creative non-fiction, “big” writing projects, his “desk drawer projects,” and his new book. Listen here.
Commonplace Book #279
By the end of World War II the divergence between democratic socialism and social democracy was something quite definitive, not merely a rhetorical convention, albeit with room for exceptions at both ends. Democratic socialists held out for some form of […]
Trump is out on bail. What does that mean?
Now that Donald Trump is the first ex-president to be let out of prison on bail, many Americans may be wondering what it all means. Megan Stevenson, a law professor at the University of Virginia, explains in her recent piece […]
Benjamin Rush’s “Travels Through Life”
The American Philosophical Society has digitized eight handwritten volumes of Declaration of Independence signer Dr. Benjamin’s Rush‘s “Travels Through Life.” J.L. Bell has the story at Boston 1775. A taste: Here’s another source on the Revolution recently digitized: eight handwritten volumes of Dr. […]
The Author’s Corner with Scott Douglas Gerber
Scott Douglas Gerber is Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University and Associated Scholar at Brown University’s Political Theory Project. This interview is based on his new book, Law and Religion in Colonial America: The Dissenting Colonies (Cambridge University Press, […]
Evangelical roundup for August 28, 2023
What is happening in Evangelical land? Do evangelicals need a new ecclesiology? Why evangelicals support the Afghan Adjustment Act. Julie Roys and Karen Swallow Prior on the “evangelical imagination.” Prayer cards on trees: Tony Evans has a podcast. Shane Claiborne […]