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Holding It All Together
One of the best seminary lectures I ever sat through was a one-off given by a graduate student trying out his skills for a Systematic Theology class. He asked us to list off all of the different terms used in … Continue reading
Posted in Faith, Teaching
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On Lewis and the Nature of Reality
We just started a unit on creative non-fiction in my Faith & Literature class. I thought reading some of N. D. Wilson’s short essays would be a nice place to start. We recently watched this short video from Wilson about … Continue reading
On Thinking Christianly
From an interview with Francis Spufford, author of Unapologetic: That music you hear in the distance? It’s St Augustine, St Teresa, Teilhard de Chardin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Simone Weil all singing together, and what they are singing is that, as … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Commonplace Book, Faith, Teaching
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Google and a God Named Theuth
From Michael Harris’s The End of Absence: In Plato’s Phaedrus, we hear Socrates describing how a king from Egypt called Thamus informed the god Theuth that the phonetic alphabet was not so great a gift. The god was particularly chuffed … Continue reading
A Different Kind of Sophomore Slump
Last week I posted excerpts and a link to a “message to college freshmen.” One of my favorite authors, James K. A. Smith, recently wrote his own “letter to college sophomores” that serves as a nice kind of sequel. He … Continue reading
Put It In A Common Place . . . Book
This semester I’m getting to teach my Faith & Literature class. I require my students to keep a commonplace book throughout the semester that includes significant quotes and reflections. The last time the class ran, my students had to take … Continue reading
It’s What You Do with the Dots That Matters
From Seth Godin’s blog: Without a doubt, the ability to connect the dots is rare, prized and valuable. Connecting dots, solving the problem that hasn’t been solved before, seeing the pattern before it is made obvious, is more essential than … Continue reading
Augustine and Getting Love Right
I’m currently reading my way through James K. A. Smith’s new book on relativism, which is a lot more interesting than it sounds.¹ A third of the way through the book, Smith brings up Augustine and his book on education … Continue reading
What You Love and How You Love It
One of the biggest blessings in my understanding of things over the last couple of years has been the writings of James K. A. Smith. His Desiring the Kingdom was a real “right place, right time” scenario for me. He’s … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Faith, Internet, Teaching
Tagged Cultural Liturgies, James K A Smith
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Acknowledging Emergence
One of the best things I took away from David Brooks’ The Social Animal is his thinking on emergent systems. His definition: Emergent systems exist when different elements come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of … Continue reading
Space Enough, and Time 