The Big Bang Theory: From Caricature to Complexity (Peter Augustine Lawler): “The Big Bang Theory ultimately points to the limited but real wisdom that comes from understanding two partial truths—that of the personal, judgmental, loving God and also that of the ‘God of nature’ the scientists seek to understand. The show leads us to think about how to put together the two explanations of ‘the Big Bang’—one based on faith in a personal Creator and one based on scientific discovery of the impersonal laws of nature—to account truthfully for both nature and human nature.”
Elixir vitae
“Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world.” And a non-trivial evidence of benevolent Providence!
via How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up – NYTimes.com.
Laptops in the classroom
resistance is futile, part zillion – Text Patterns – The New Atlantis: “My students are in class with me for two-and-a-half hours, 150 minutes, per week. During those 150 minutes I choose to focus on our using, together, the technology of the codex.”
Alan Jacobs hits the spot on why professors ban laptops (and presumably, tablets) in the classroom. I may be considering this for the future, especially when it’s combined with that research showing that note taking goes better in handwriting.
In Praise of Coffee
Coffee is the very beverage of the people of God, and the cordial of his servants who thirst for wisdom. When coffee is infused into the bowl, it exhales the odor of musk, and is of the color of ink. The truth is not known except to the wise who drink it from the foaming coffee cup. God has deprived fools of coffee, who with invincible obstinacy condemn its use as injurious.
— Journal of the Transylvanian Medical Society, 1834
The Rise of the Helicopter Teacher
Teaching and parenting share this in common: In both relationships, the goal is to produce independent and self-sufficient human beings. The risk that helicopter parents run is that they will raise children so coddled that they have a hard time functioning on their own in the larger world. So too with the way we have infantilized our students. Afraid or unwilling to challenge them, we pass them through with perfectly good grades but without much of a sense of how to work on their own or think for themselves. – The Rise of the Helicopter Teacher
Just to be fair, here’s an acknowledgement that helicopter teaching is also a thing to avoid. Every vocation has its pitfalls.
One for the parents dropping children off at college this weekend
Bye-Bye Birdies: Sending The Kids Away to College – Tenured Radical – The Chronicle of Higher Education: “many faculty see behavior in students (particularly absenteeism, lateness, disorganization and requests for special arrangements) as irresponsible, lazy, dishonest and immature, when in fact students are living, and making decisions, in ways that make complete sense to them and to their parents. So without further ado, here are things you can do as a parent to make your kid a strong and independent college student.”
In short, don’t be helicopter parents! (In fairness, K-12 practices do seem to encourage this but college is not Grade 13.)
St. Benedict retrospective
Yesterday was St. Benedict‘s day; it’s the second of two, as his proper day is March 21st, but June 11th has also long been celebrated. 
Three monks made simple vows and that’s always a fine moment for the college as well as the monastery.
In the spirit of the day, here’s a reflection on Benedict the saint from Benedict the pope emeritus.
Odysseus and the liberal arts?
Odysseus: Patron Hero of the Liberal Arts: “So how will I present this illiterate pagan Odysseus, a man, moreover, with the additional disadvantage of being a fiction, as the patron saint of liberal arts, the arts of interpretation?”
Since Eva Brann is asking the question, her answer is more than worth hearing. TLDR; if we cannot interpret our own lives, they will be interpreted for us by others. And in that case, why bother living?
Weekly Reading – Herodotus
Fresh out of Guardian columns, but here’s this week’s reading nonetheless. Just wound up the new translation of Herodotus’s The Histories, by Tom Holland. It’s a fine version, although idiomatically modern in many places. But that does serve to make the text more immediate, and probably more like what the initial audience in Athens would have heard. Highly recommended, and much better than getting your Thermopylae by way of Frank Miller.
Note for the Fourth of July
The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.
– Neal Stephenson
Weekly Reading – Spinoza
And now to the last of the Guardian weekly readings posts, with a look at Spinoza. There’s an odd resemblance to Calvin, at least in my personal pantheon, that would have horrified both of them. Each is a beautifully structured thinker, in a very admirable way, but one that I just can’t follow along with.
The particular thing about Spinoza is the recent vogue in attributing the entire foundation of the modern world to him, exemplified in a whole series of things by Jonathan Israel.
- Part 1: Philosophy as a way of life
- Part 2: Miracles and God’s will
- Part 3: What God is not
- Part 4: All there is, is God
- Part 5: On human nature
- Part 6: Understanding the emotions
- Part 7: On the ethics of the self
- Part 8: Reading the Ethics
When I was reading him in grad school, there were various editions but they all seem to have been superseded by the Hackett Complete Works. The biography to read is Nadler’s.
Computers: yes, but…
“Computers are great, and I not only encourage their use by my students, I try to teach students how to use computers better. But for about three hours a week, we set the computers aside and look at books. It’s not so great a sacrifice.”
– Alan Jacobs, Laptops of the Borg
I’m thinking more and more about a similar policy for the Fall; check out the post for some of the classroom-use considerations, on top of the handwritten notes point that I blogged earlier.
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