Tag: learning
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Students
Every session, as the session proceeds, my level of annoyance with the students – some of the students, at least – rises. “Are we going to need that book?” [About one of two books listed as “required,” two weeks into the course.] “I have been really busy with work, so I couldn’t take the quizzes […]
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Self-Discovery
Here’s what I’ve learned in less than three days of teaching a class online: It is abundantly far more difficult to video a deck of slides than I had asked for or imagined. Corollary: twice my usual last minute, so what I thought would be the last couple of minutes, which is twice what I […]
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Think of it as a Learning Experience
Steele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. W.W. Norton, 2010. [An installment of the “Read Me” Project.] This is not a book about race in the United States. And yet, it is not not a book about race in the United States, either. The concepts the author explores […]
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Things Geographers Know
Williams, Will. Geography in Bite-Sized Chunks. Metro Books, 2017. [An installment of the “Read Me” Project.] What comes to mind when someone says “geography”? I immediately think of the hard red plastic pencil case with the map of the United States embossed on the top in scratchy white outlines, and the little wheels on either […]
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What We Call Essential
Have you ever had to see your past from a whole new angle? It happened this morning, in church, to me. “This is a sermon about one of the most popular and well-known verses in the Bible,” said our pastor, introducing the sermon … He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what […]
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Greatest Hits of Aesthetics?
Kul-Want, Christopher and Piero. Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide. Icon Books, 2012. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] The problems with aesthetics begin with spelling and pronunciation. In my experience, a lot of people incline to calling it ascetics. I took some courses on aesthetics once, and I usually think I like it, but […]
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Trinity Sunday
We all know, or should know, that it is not possible for our human minds to grasp the deep mystery of the Trinity. Fortunately, then, our pastor did not attempt to explain the Trinity in church this morning. [The angel of the Corydon Presbyterian Church may have breathed a sigh of relief. At least, I […]
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Undetermined
We’re less free than we think. We’re creatures of habit, with paradigmatically pre-fabricated attitudes, deeply pre-constructed preferences, subliminally influenced inclinations, socially conditioned choices, and systemically structured first impressions and reflexes. And we’re more free than we know. At any given moment, capable of … something else; open to pausing, noticing, wondering, asking, deviating, breaking the […]
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Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Some days church is like this: We talked about Romans 12:9-21 in class, mostly thinking out loud about times something had been challenging for us: was that “not avenging ourselves”? was that “hating what was evil and holding fast to what was good”? was that loving? Practically, day by day, making those decisions requires … […]
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Getting Ready for World Religions
The small liberal arts university where I occasionally teach offers courses in “World Religions.” The discipline of Religious Studies questions the “world religions approach” these days, for good reasons, along with the very idea of “religion” as separate from things like “society” or “culture” or “knowledge,” but the courses are staples of the curriculum. So […]
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Learning as Revelation
Christians have long accepted the proposition that God acts in and through history. The idea that God acts in history suggests that history itself is, in principle, a legitimate source of revelation. On one hand, this is a dangerous idea. It is at least as difficult to interpret God’s activity and Word in history as […]
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Personal Knowledge
This seems so basic that it’s one of those things “everybody knows” – and yet, sometimes I’m taken by surprise by things “everybody knows.” When we know someone, or are getting to know someone, presumably there are things we can know about the person that stay the same, because the person stays the same over […]
Matters of Interpretation 