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Showing posts from November, 2016

The Education Vortex

My friend and colleague Joel Hummel encouraged me to watch the movie Idiocracy during the 2012 Presidential primary season. I have never been so torn between laughing uproariously and crying bitterly in my entire life. Until now. The selection of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education in the next administration is an insult to every child and every public school teacher in America. Mrs. DeVos is an avowed Creationist. She supports the use of public (read: tax) money to pay for private education, including in religious schools, through the use of vouchers. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that her religious belief probably trumps any support she should have for excellent science education, regardless of public or private school environment. The progress we have started to make in STEM/STEAM fields over the past few years with the introduction of high standards of achievement (Common Core, which though the name is reviled makes a lot of sense as a concept and

Wisdom and Folly for the Week of the 2016 Election

I have never been so relieved not to be preaching on a Sunday in my entire career. Maybe that will change by the end of the week and I'll be aching to proclaim some Good News into the world, in which case, my blog post might be a sermon (so fair warning). This is adapted from the Call to Worship I used for the contemplative service this morning at the Regional Theological Education Consortium of the United Church of Christ gathering in Oberlin, Ohio. We have been studying the texts for Epiphany season, which raise up the ideas of folly and wisdom. We aren't gifted with knowledge of the future; perhaps the voice of the people has actually spoken wisdom even though it sounds like folly to so many of us in this moment. If it is folly, we still have wise voices to call us to reflection and change in the years ahead. So here is my offering; feel free to use and adapt but please give credit as noted below. Peace. Grace. Hope. And most of all, Love. A Call to Worship for the Su

Epistemological Epiphanies

Don’t run away! I promise this won’t be deeply academic, it’s just that those are the word of the week for me and they happened to collide on my drive to Ohio Sunday afternoon. Epistemology is how we know what we know, or the system/method by which we discern what is true. If, for example, you only trust what you have personally experienced with your five senses, you fall into an epistemological system called “empiricism.” An epiphany is an insight that changes us (in small or large ways) that seems to come from within though often with a triggering experience that happens to us. Most of us would call these “AHA!” moments. I had two epiphanies on my drive, one precipitated by the other. The first is that I haven’t made headway on the conversion of my dissertation into a book yet because I didn’t have the first piece of the puzzle necessary for changing it into a general audience book. It turns out that I can do less rewriting and more revising if I add an entire new chapte