Why Do I Teach?

“College education is a proliferation of such possibilities: the beauty of mathematical discovery, the thrill of scientific understanding, the fascination of historical narrative, the mystery of theological speculation. We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates. Knowledge, when it comes, is a later arrival, flaring up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls.”

Gary Gutting, "Why Do I Teach?" The Stone - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=144567

Newcastle Herald Op-Ed

“Recent census data in the United Kingdom and Australia indicates that rates of religious observance remain low. However, from marriage equality and reproductive rights to political radicalism and terrorism, religion remains ever visible in political life. So too, a quick pass through the cinema presents us with a popcorn of paranormal activity. The ghosts of religion haunt our secular societies, and this has prompted new research at the University of Newcastle.”

"Opinion: State of Religion in Politics" - http://bit.ly/17W0NaB

RIPL Public Forum

The New Institute is promoting a public forum on Religion in Political Life this coming Wednesday, 22 May, 7-8.30pm in the Newcastle Civic Hall's Hunter Room. The format will be a panel discussion with myself, Kathleen McPhillips and Terry Lovat discussing our work in the University of Newcastle's Religion in Political Life Research Program. Further details on the event can be found here.

Modal Religion

“In Australia, religious rhetoric in the political sphere seems designed almost specifically not to speak first, or most directly, to the religiously committed, who are likely to be already quite politically engaged and to have fixed their vote fairly firmly to one side of politics or the other.

Instead, its appeal seems aimed mostly at what Mol called the “modal” Australians who identify vaguely with tradition, do not go as far as to declare themselves atheist (like Gillard) or agnostic (like Hawke) but for whom religious categories speak of a nostalgic sense of safety and security.”

Marion Maddox, "God under Gillard: Religion and Politics in Australia," ABC Religion & Ethics - http://bit.ly/10aVOik

MOOC Justice?

One of the clearest explications of what's at stake in online education today has been made public as an open letter from the San Jose State University's Philosophy Department to Michael Sandel regarding the use of the EdX MOOC on Justice.

“What kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard?”

"The Document: An Open Letter from San Jose State U.'s Philosophy Department," The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/10aXPqW

Electronic Tatoos

Disposable Academics

“ON THE evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year... They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.”

"Doctoral Degrees: The Disposable Academic" The Economist -  http://econ.st/10dWA96

Theology AND Religion

“In Britain, by contrast, the trend has been to integrate theology and religious studies, to the extent of questioning the legitimacy of the dichotomy. The wisdom behind this stance might be summed up in the following seven propositions.”

- David Ford, "Theological Wisdom, British Style"  

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1976

 

Shady Characters

“Punctuation itself – literally, the act of adding ‘points’ to a text – did not arrive until the third century BC, when Aristophanes of the great Library at Alexandria described a series of middle (·), low (.) and high points (˙) denoting short, medium and long pauses. Over the centuries, this system gave rise to punctuation as we know it: from Aristophanes’ three dots came the colon, the full stop, and many other marks besides. At the same time the paragraphos evolved into the ‘pilcrow,’ a C-shaped mark (¶) placed at the start of each new section in a text. The word space was a late arrival, appearing only when monks in medieval England and Ireland began splitting apart unfamiliar Latin texts to make them easier to read.”

"Maximal meaning in minimal space: the history of punctuation" - http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/?p=279

Humanities STEM

“We’re not as different as they think. Yes, calculus is one of the great achievements of the human mind, but Hamlet is another. The violin is a third. With apologies to C.P. Snow, humanities versus sciences is a false dichotomy. Both the sciences and the humanities require deep creativity and intellectualism, an ability and desire to use reason, and a willingness to change your mind. When they attack the humanities, they are attacking all of us, they just don’t understand enough science to know it.”

"Why STEM Should Care About the Humanities" The Chronicle - http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/?p=4037

Plagiarism 101

“I conceded, however, that the effort required to produce such a convincing act of plagiarism would not be substantially less than the effort required to produce an honest research paper.”

"Successful Plagiarism 101" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/10WAMTp

On Shipwrecks

I sometimes liken studying humanities at Newcastle to engaging the ocean beaches here. In the beginning of your studies you learn to swim, avoid riptides, and maybe start to body surf a bit in the waves. More advanced students eventually learn to make surfboards with wood lying about and some become quite acrobatic. Later even boats can be made and whole crews join massive research vessels that take off to sail the ocean blue. However, it seems to me that advanced studies in philosophy, religion and theology are something more akin to scuba diving. We study those ships that sink, interrogating their integrity under extreme conditions. Our task includes the various disciplines that surf and sail, maybe even sublating them to draw on Hegel's terminology. However, our aim is to look beneath the waves. It might be called an interest in substance, but probably best to leave it vague given how many ways we've come to think of being since Aristotle first identified metaphysics as such.

To some surfers it's hard to tell what we're doing, as we're invisible below the water. To others who care to peak, it seems rather odd that we might be interested in such de(con)struction. Still the passion for scuba is so strong that I've even known some of my colleagues to sink old ships intentionally and wait for the coral to grow. It's messy at first, but soon, whole new ecosystems develop. New schools of fish come to swim and eek out an existence (new sharks too). I've come to think that some of the new things we're doing in religion and theology at Newcastle require some sinking and settling. But there's a reef waiting for us if our wreck catches those age old ocean currents.

Spectacle of Possession

“There are a lot of monster-stories that express anxieties about what it means to be human. Vampires and zombies and werewolves are eloquent allegories about the fear of losing one’s humanity, but they aren’t terribly complicated. The 1970s movies about demonic children, however, are not just stories about losing yourself but about losing control over yourself. They are horrors of agency, meaning your capacity to be truly in charge of your actions. Don’t Look Now is so terrifying because it mixes the fear of losing a child with the fear of the supernatural, and shows how similar those fears are. Parenting means surrendering control—you get taken over by your responsibility and love for the child. Demonic possession is not so very different, if you believe in it. The devil and children are both scary because they rob you of your autonomy, so the devil being inside your child is a double-whammy of primal terror.

These films help explain Levack’s central argument, just as Levack’s book illuminates what makes these films so good. The key to the “popularity” of possession in early modern Europe, he says, is that it was a great spectacle. This is why films about possession work: possession is about agency but also humankind’s tendency to put on a show. Possession, in short, is very watchable.”

"When Nuns Puked Nails" http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=133126

Generous Atheism?

“No matter how they answer the God question, generous-minded people could profit from adopting an attitude of critical sympathy towards religion and maybe even taking the odd dip into it – provided they heed Canon William Vanstone’s warning that the Church is like a public swimming pool, where most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”

"After God: What Can Atheists Learn from Believers?" New Statesman -http://bit.ly/10tPe3D

Religion in a Chinese MBA

“The executive M.B.A. curriculum at Cheung Kong includes classes on philosophy, Eastern and Western religion, global history and literature. ‘We hope our executive students can strive for enlightened lives — it may not be attainable, but it should be strived for,’ Mr. Xiang said.”

"In China, Executives Flock Back to Graduate School" - http://nyti.ms/XIAeRS

UC Online

“Online classes are and will be part of the educational mix, in California and elsewhere. But they cannot be counted on to revive a beleaguered public system whose mission is to educate a great many freshmen who need close instruction and human contact to succeed. To broaden access and preserve what is left of the public university, California lawmakers will need to change budget priorities that have been moving in the wrong direction for a long time.”

"Resurrecting California's Public Universities - http://nyti.ms/10r8ltK

The Talmud Diet

“The medieval physician and legal scholar Maimonides similarly instructed people to eat and drink less than what filled their bellies (he thought the stomach should be three-quarters full). Moreover, they should eat slowly. Modern science corroborates Maimonides: it takes about 20 minutes for the brain to receive messages from the stomach that it has had enough. Satiety can be achieved with less food than one might think, and it requires more time to reach it.”

http://nyti.ms/Zy5O3b

On Anti-Judaism

“It would be churlish to end on such a note. A good book—and Anti-Judaism is a very good one indeed—raises more questions than it answers. Nirenberg makes perfectly clear, with good reason, the questions that concern him most. Martin Luther’s onslaughts on the Jews were even more violent and destructive than those of his Catholic predecessors. Nirenberg shows that they arose in the first place from biblical interpretations hammered out in controversy with Luther’s theological antagonists. This, not actual conversions for which little real evidence exists, was the basis of his anxiety that the world was converting to Judaism. Nirenberg concludes, ‘I am not interested in contributing to arguments, so often dominated by apologetics and anachronism, about whether Martin Luther was an anti-Semite or an architect of the Holocaust. My point is that Luther’s reconceptualization of the ways in which language mediates between God and creation was achieved by thinking with, about, and against Jews and Judaism.’ Generalized to embrace the whole of Western intellectual history, this becomes a point of great importance. It will take some time to absorb its implications.”

"The Quarrels of Others: On Anti-Semitism" The Nation -http://bit.ly/YwqvQf

You're Distracted

“The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students’ awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill’s course, ‘Information and Contemplation,’ goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation—during class—to sharpen their attention.”

"You're Distracted, This Professor Can Help" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/16c1Obi