Why Are College Courses “Challenging?”

I have been thinking about a question recently that is so fundamental to what college professors do that we often lose track of it. The question is, do my courses “challenge” students, and why? A deeper question might be, what is the purpose of a college class, particularly in the Religion department? [...]

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The Bible and Popular Culture

I just got my copy of a new book to which I had the honor of contributing, Teaching the Bible Through Popular Culture and the Arts, edited by Patrick Gray and Mark Roncace. Other contributers include PTS friends Brent Driggers and Brent Strawn. I am very pleased that Patrick asked me to be [...]

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There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide…

Greg Knauss has a theory that good programmers don’t make good managers, and vice versa. That is not exactly a new insight, but I really like his metaphor for explaining the difference: managers operate at a high level but have relatively shallow engagement in a broad range of tasks; programmers are involved with one [...]

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The Paperless Academic

Steven Levy, expert on another famous item, is positioning himself as the chronicler of the next great media device: the e-book reader. He provides an in-depth analysis of Amazon’s coming efforts, the Kindle. Between the iPhone (and coming knock-offs) and the Kindle, are we are one step closer to research nirvana: all of [...]

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The Creation Museum

This sardonic review of the Creation Museum in Kentucky is a must-read. Be sure to check out the Flickr stream for the photographic evidence. The best quote in my opinion:
 
Will these folks find the arguments they find at the Creation Museum convincing? Again, you got me. I certainly hope not, but more [...]

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The Politics of Historical Interpretation

This series of articles inspired by a tenure controversy in Middle East Studies at Columbia raises important questions not only about the tenure process but also about the intellectual emptiness of much current anti-historical scholarship.
One of the essays is by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a truly excellent person whom I met while giving a paper in the [...]

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