I suspect the reality about American religious knowledge is actually better and worse than the results indicate. The internet is crackling with a minor fire about the results of a Pew survey which, as many news outlets put it, indicates that atheists know more about religion than Christians. A quick sampling of blogs enshrined to …
Today is William Isaac Woodlief’s sixth birthday. At lunch, he asked me how many days until he’s seven. He likes to plan ahead that way. Isaac is full-hearted and brave, and one day I hope to be just like him.
Thomas Spence, president of Spence Publishing, has a must-read piece in last week’s Wall Street Journal, titled “How to Raise Boys Who Read.” He takes aim at the latest fad, which is to get the video-game and television-besotted little cretins to read by dealing out books about farts and boogers, as if reading is itself …
I’ve been thinking about justice, and how we’ve come to imagine it as the infliction of suffering in response to wrong. It seems to me a deeper justice is not pain for pain, but the setting of things to rights. What is wrong, in other words, is made no longer wrong. Justice in this view …
“He said that he did indeed have a long journey. He said he did not know what the end of his journey would look like or whether he would know it when he got there and he asked her in spanish to pray for him but she said she had already decided to do so …
Speaking of Woodlief vacations, you might enjoy my latest piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Our Love Affair With the Fairs.”
More on the Great Woodlief Vacation of 2010, which might also have been titled: “You do know it’s 1400 miles to the East Coast, right?” When last I left off, I had just extricated the Big Love van from a midget-sized parking garage, and relocated it to West Virginia. Let’s pick up again outside the …
I’ve cut grass and cleaned offices and guarded buildings; I’ve been a grill cook and a college teacher and a karate instructor. I’ve bussed tables and stocked labs and punched numbers; I’ve managed more emotional twenty-somethings than I can count, hired people and fired people and balanced razor-thin budgets. The hardest job I ever had, …
It just never gets old, the article by an academic detailing all the work that academics have to do. Rob Faunce offers the latest installment: We have to plan for our courses weeks in advance. We have papers to grade. Students to counsel. Department meetings to attend. One thing I’ve learned, in my stints across …
I took six books with me for a two-week vacation. Since I also took my four children, we have a clear indication that I understand neither math nor children. This may also explain why I found myself, through a series of events with which I won’t bore you, driving a 14-passenger van into Washington, D.C. …
