Miscellany
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“The Real Thing At Last”
“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point when he said it would have its own legal staff and its own police. . . The real thing is that…
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Elder Care
Yesterday, I visited my mother at the nursing home. The facility is just over an hour away, and prior to Covid I visited every 2-3 weeks, usually with my daughters. We would enter…
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Read-alouds and the moral imagination
I’m reading Live Not By Lies, by Rod Dreher. It’s a discussion of the “soft totalitarianism” spreading in America, and how people in general, and Christians in particular, can be alert to it…
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Piranesi
I left this book out of my roundup. Written by Susanna Clarke, Piranesi came out in the fall. I was so excited by the prospect of another book 16 years after Clarke’s astonishing…
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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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“Reimagining Education”
I’ve been wanting to write a post to organize my thoughts about online teaching. Yesterday the governor’s announcement that he’s teaming up with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to “reimagine” education “in…