Current Events
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Smarts, Big Tech, and Faustian bargains
Do digital tools make us smarter? It’s a question raised by some who study technology and its effects on cognition. In my freshman writing classes, we usually explore this topic through essays like…
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Good or bad? Time will tell.
This week, my daughter asked, “What would we have done during the shutdowns without technology? How would you still teach college? How would people work remotely? How would kids do school? How would…
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Church in a pandemic
Like most churches, mine has adopted a strategy to preserve business as usual through a season of state-enforced shutdowns of venues where people gather to minimize spread of coronavirus. First, they tried to…
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A bigger, better story
Looking around at the irrationality and destruction and rage tempts me to despair. But I drew some encouragement from C.S. Lewis this morning. It wasn’t current events that prompted me to pick up…
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Am I dreaming?
Last week as I walked the dog, I noticed more houses with flags displayed. When I got home, I took ours out of the closet where it sits except for Memorial Day and…
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A fate worse than death?
The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I…
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Precision of language, please.
So Jonas’s father says to him when he asks whether his parents love him in Lois Lowry’s The Giver. They come to mind as a good title for this post because I’m thinking…
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In crisis, we crave the humanities
This article in Inside HigherEd makes the point that even in the midst of a crisis, the humanities — fields of study that explore human history, society, art and language and literature, spiritual…
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Is there a crisis of expertise?
When should we trust the experts? For that matter, who counts as an expert, and on what is this based? Expertise is by nature narrow and specialized; at what point does someone’s expertise…
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Knee-Jerk Reactions to Homeschooling: Child Advocacy — or Totalitarianism?
Though I dispute the term “homeschooling” to describe the COVID-19-inspired shift to distance learning in public education, it is clearly causing discomfort not just for those directly involved, but for theorists and policy-makers.…