Book Review: The Assault on Reason

Perhaps the single funniest thing about this book, as I noted in an earlier post, is that Al Gore, one of the AM radio crowd’s most hated enemies, has written a book basically extending the argument of Neil Postman, one of the late twentieth century’s best conservative philosophers.
(That evaluation, of course, comes from likely the [...]

Feeling Good about Things

I’ve got the first batch of books together for dissertation research, and I’m a chapter into the first one.  I meet with Dr. Teague about the prospectus next week.
I’ve got course descriptions for my fall classes online, and I’m ready to send out the introductory email to the kids who unwittingly signed up for a [...]

Sir Micah

Micah’s VBS theme next week will be fairy tales, so we outfitted him as Sir Micah.

Sir Micah dashes into battle

Sir Micah with helm, shield, and sword

Closeup of Sir Micah’s helm

A Reward for Comps

Here it is–my new gadget, a Sony Reader 505. As a celebration of finishing comps, Mary let me cash in a year’s worth of Borders gift cards and pay the balance. I’ve already loaded a hundred seventy free books onto it, and it’s going with me on the road to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, [...]

The Stupidity of Political Pundits

State’s Decline the Result of… blah blah blah
I’ll admit that at times I’ve thought this kind of moronic assertion was proper only to Republican pundits, but once again I’m reminded that schoolteachers can be punching bags for whatever pundit who doesn’t have his boy in office.  To reiterate what I wrote a few days ago, [...]

ABD

No long post right now, but I passed my oral exams.
I’m ABD!
Yes, I have updated my CV.  Click the tab!

Book Reviews Coming Soon

Pleased with my performance on written comps, I undertook this weekend to start a NON-COMPS BOOK for the first time in a while, and I’ve also been reading in totality a book whose first thirty pages or so I skimmed so that I could cite it in combat.
The former is Al Gore’s 2007 book The [...]

Evolution and ID: Some categorical confusions

This little essay is a cross-post from Conservative Reformed Mafia.
Metaphysics and Epistemology
Folks who recognize these words will doubtless first think of academic philosophy rather than academic biology, but the big questions (as I see them) at play in this debate are in fact philosophical ones. To start in reverse order, the big epistemological question [...]

This Just In

It looks like I’ll be taking oral exams this Tuesday.  The graduate coordinator’s office emailed me this afternoon, and I’ve passed written comps.
The standard thing to say at this point (it’s factually true) is thus: “They can never make me take the written exams again.”
So here goes: “They can never make me take the written [...]

Just say it was a bad idea

State Schools Superintendent Throws Out Tests
I know full well that a politician’s admitting a mistake is only allowed to happen when a resignation is turned in (and any former students reading this, note how many passive verbs pop up when I talk about politics), and I know that opposing a policy that one formerly championed, [...]

Tonight’s Micah pics

Nothing grand; just an early summer afternoon at the little playground.

Delayed Kudos to the Standard

Bob Hull’s “Can we Talk?”
With my mind consumed with comps this week, I didn’t take the time earlier this week to point my readers (I love both of ya!) to this good little piece by my beloved Greek professor Dr. Hull.  Perhaps it resonates so much because I tried to take on similar concerns in [...]

Only Waiting Left

Perhaps appropriately, I’ve just written my last comprehensive written exam at a small table at Panera Bread in Athens.  When ten o’clock came and went with no exam questions, I decided to take matters into my own hands and drive in to campus and get Dr. Medine’s questions.  Of course, as things tend to go, [...]

T Minus Ninety Minutes

The last written exam will come down the pipe in an hour and a half. Of the three exams, this one covers the field with which I’m most familiar, but it’s a MASSIVE field. My longtime readers (both of you) might remember that, back in October, the English department made me double a [...]

Two Down

Teague’s exam is in the can.  This one was thirteen double-spaced pages long (still in three hours), but on the long essay she asked me to discuss theology and literature, so what did she expect but a deluge?
Tomorrow’s exam brings its own worries–I’m most familiar with theology and lit, but the reading list [...]

Three Hours to Go

The exam that frightens me most starts at nine this morning.  There was no reading list, and Dr. Teague takes pride in that.  She told me to think about how I’d teach Renaissance Drama and how I’d schematize the plays of the period, and I have.  She told me to read broadly, and I have.  [...]

From the Inside

This is definitely turning out to be a rite of passage.  Given the raw amount of text I cranked out, and given that I’m pretty sure it all pertained to the questions, I know rationally that my odds of passing that first test are pretty good.  Yet every time I slow down from studying for [...]

One Down

I just transmitted my Renaissance Poetry and Prose exam to the graduate office.  I typed eleven double-spaced pages, covering a hundred years of literary texts, in three hours.  Although I’ve only left my computer desk’s chair to go to the bathroom in the last three hours, and although our house couldn’t be warmer than seventy-five [...]

Corrupting Micah

Last night, as Mary and I put Micah to bed, he volunteered to say the nightly prayers.  (He does so about every other night.)  This time, though, in addition to the standard “Thank you for Mommy and Daddy,” he threw in a “Thank you for my homies.”  I can’t wait until he breaks that one [...]

Micah at the Zoo

This Sunday was Zoo day at Bear Hollow in Athens, and so we joined the little utopia that is Bear Hollow on a Sunday afternoon, donating our three dollars per person to support the zoo that lets us visit for free all year. BTW, Kudos to WordPress both for their massive file space upgrade [...]