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Tag Archives: For Common Things
Beyond Common Things
A few months ago I spent some time working through Jedediah Purdy’s For Common Things. I first heard of the book when it was name-dropped on The Newsroom. When I read it, I found a genuine struggle with making sense … Continue reading
Generating Hope
Every spring, I ask my students questions from an old “discussion questions for youth groups” book. This past week, one of the questions concerned what period of time students would live in if they could choose a pre-2000 life. The … Continue reading
Independence and Inheritance
Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a kind of (time) bubble. Contemporary society floats above the mire of history untethered, we think. In this selection from For Common Things, Jedidiah Purdy might beg to differ: What we should … Continue reading
Maneuvering the Public/Private Divide
One of the trickier parts of being a teacher is how the work you do seeps into life beyond the classroom. It is not uncommon to hear teachers say something like “sometimes I wish I had work that I could … Continue reading
Doing Good Work
From Purdy’s For Common Things: One thing that a culture does is give people ways of thinking about what they are doing. They can see the connections among their work, their talents and the needs of the world. They perceive … Continue reading
“Stable, Certain, Solid Things”
One of the things that is clear from the outset of reading For Common Things is that Purdy is a man shaped by a time (perhaps both personal and historic) that has really established his thinking in a fundamental way. … Continue reading
The Contemporary Question of the Self
One of the basic questions every worldview tries to answer (thank you, James Sire) concerns the nature of humanity. In class we often talk about whether man is good or evil by nature, how much choice we actually have in … Continue reading
When Irony Killed the World
Perhaps the most important question posed by Mad Max: Fury Road was found scrawled on a couple of walls in the movie’s bleak landscape: who killed the world? And while it’s obvious in the movie that man and his greed … Continue reading
On Paying Attention
At the end of the final season of The Newsroom, Jedidiah Purdy and For Common Things get name-dropped. Being a fan of show-runner Aaron Sorkin, I decided to give the book a try. I ordered it from Amazon, only to … Continue reading
Space Enough, and Time 