A Post-MOOC world?

Things are starting to get interesting and counter-intuitive.

Beep beep: from theology to cars

Ben Myers pulls a slam dunk, in his own diminutive style.

The Humanities

Pity the humanities. Enrollment in post-secondary humanities programmes is down to around 7% of the total student population in the U.S. (in Canada, it's only slightly higher if memory serves) and here is a nice NYT article (if one can use the word 'nice' in this context) that details some of the current discussion on the state of the humanities. Of which there is much discussion... From the end of the article comes this analysis which I wish had received more attention throughout:

But for students worrying about their own future, Shakespeare can seem an obstacle to getting on with their lives.

“Students who are anxious about finishing their degree, and avoiding debt, sometimes see the breadth requirements as getting in their way,” said Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

Many do not understand that the study of humanities offers skills that will help them sort out values, conflicting issues and fundamental philosophical questions, said Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College.

“We have failed to make the case that those skills are as essential to engineers and scientists and businessmen as to philosophy professors,” he said.

 This coheres with an observation that was made by Stefan Collini in his book, What are Universities for? a year or two ago and which I quoted in a recent paper on the relationship between Christian faith and the university:
  

“it is not the subject-matter itself that determines whether something is, at a particular moment, classed as ‘useful’ or ‘useless’. Almost any subject can fall under either description.”  (Collini, 55)

In other words: Theology, English, Philosophy and Linguistics can launch a career in any number of fields, because the skills acquired in these disciplines has to do with deepening the general knowledge, perception and honing of insights that will benefit the individual generally speaking. It is for this reason why we must push back against over-specialization, especially in the humanities, because it is that circumstance that the humanities would loses their collective humanity, and therefore their timeless relevance.

Quebec's descent into madness

Here's where we're going here in Quebec. Loony tunes time folks - the government is trying to overthrow constitutional law and human rights...

Mark Kingwell gets it

RE: university education.
In an article in today's Globe. Nicely done!

Assessing Joseph Bottum

The former editor of First Things has created a stir with his tepid - and strategic - endorsement of the idea that same-sex marriage ought not to be fought in the trenches. He sees the Catholic Church's opposition to the idea as ill-tempered and self-defeating. In response, Rusty Reno's reflections of the other day are on the mark in my view (his opinions being important as he is Bottum's successor at FT), but so are the more temperate remarks of Ross Douthat in today's Times.

Creativity: The Missing Element within the contemporary academy

A nice post from Helen deCruz at newapps blog today. Certainly a good antidote to what I see all around me: the tendency to know more and more about less and less, funded to a (now) lesser extent by research grants. All a sad testimony to the current state of university life: no core curricula, students ill prepared to write in coherent English and many ideologically predisposed university programmes that are either geared to bean counting careers or fighting some imaginary emancipatory struggle in a jargon few if any comprehend.

Ok... that's off my chest.

Helen's question about Tolkien is right on the money because his imaginary capacity had as its chief orientation the transcendent as well as the struggle between good and evil, both of which are thought by many inside the contemporary university to be entirely passé. No kidding - I've met faculty and students who speak this way...

Robert Bellah and deconstructionism

A short reference to a tale told here in a FT blog entry on the recent passing of Robert Bellah, sociologist of religion extraordinaire. In this briefest of discussions of Bellah's work and influence, a telling description of a conversation Bellah had with one of his grad students. Here is that excerpt:

There is a deep and keen moral sense in his work that deserves to be celebrated, especially in an era of postmodernist moral insouciance. One wants to stand up and cheer when reading, in his essay “The True Scholar,” of an exchange with one of his best graduate students, who argued that all human action is motivated by the struggle to increase one’s power and possessions. To which Bellah offered the perfect rejoinder. “Is that true of you?” he asked. “How could I ever trust you if that were true?” How much fashionable nonsense could be disposed of by teachers willing to pose those same simple questions, and thereby reassert the moral importance of their own work.

This is what philosophers call the performative contradiction involved in so much postmodernist thought - at least of the deconstructionist variety. That is: one's claimed belief in something being contradicted utterly by one's life as it is lived.

RIP Robert Bellah.

Original Sin: A Short Typology of Views

I recently gave a short paper at a conference of grantees associated with the Evolution and Christian Faith programme of the Biologos Foundation. In it, I sorted out certain of the elements present in the theologies of original sin of Augustine and Barth, while proposing some kind of constructive confluence of these theologians. This '3rd. option' as I termed it, is a mixture of elements taken from Augustine and Barth, but which excludes certain other elements.

For example, a contemporary view of original sin would exclude Augustine's commitment to an individual human male Adam, yet could accommodate a certain concept of inherited or (preferably) infection of human nature by sin. Such a view could take from Barth his realistic interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative as saga, but question Barth's overly rigorous view of sin as 'nothingness' since it is clear from an evolutionary perspective that many human sins do indeed have physical causes.  

This material is being worked up in a paper and eventually will be incorporated into a forthcoming monograph.

Open traditionalism

  This would be a label that I would attach to a new generation of Catholics       and other Christians whose adherence to theological and church tradition runs deep, but not in any way that is reactionary. And typically, I notice that to see open traditionalism in action, you have to look in areas of the world where there are not culture wars raging to such an extent that traditionalists get caught up in the heat of cross fire. That is: don't look for it in the United States where traditionalism is so often associated with political neo-liberalism or crude apologetics or some sort of ideological substitute for a more genuine (read: charitable) expression of Christian faith.

Today's New York Times has an article about the Dominicans in Ireland, whose expression of faith strikes me as a form of open traditionalism. I say this not only on the basis of the article however. I make this observation also with the benefit of having spent a few months of a 2010 sabbatical at Blackfriars, a private academic hall at the University of Oxford that is run by the English Dominicans. In fact, I had heard about the Dominicans' successes in Ireland (and the UK) whilst in Oxford. The NYT article focuses a bit much on the habit to my mind - a typical secular journalistic fault perhaps. But the genius of the Dominicans is - as  I saw it first hand - to blend the life of prayer with the academic vocation and the personalist, pastoral vision that is best experienced in the preaching of the friars who live in the priory and who minister in local churches, such as the Priory church on St. Giles St. in Oxford.

One more note: it is thanks to the Dominicans that we have a good news story about Catholics on the pages of the New York Times. No small feat.    

My Interview with Taede Smedes

I did a little interview with Dutch friend and colleague Taede Smedes a few weeks back. Here is the link.

The 'Old-fashioned' lecture

Listening to experts in pedagogy, student services and university curricula for the past few years has given me the impression that most people think the idea of old-fashioned lectures from professors is just that: old-fashioned, stodgy, stale, yada yada. I've never quite believed the mantras associated with this popular belief, which tend to go hand in glove with moves to ramp up distance education courses which - although they often include taped lectures - do not by their nature involve participation in a face to face encounter with a live person who lectures. And I've always thought that there is inherent value in such face to face encounters: in hearing a professor explain points on the fly; engaging (whether sympathetically or skeptically or both) with students; watching and evaluating how a professor thinks though things, maybe with notes or slides as back up, sure, but always with that adventurous aspect of the 'on the fly'.

Well. This story made my week. No, it made my month. A research study conducted here in Quebec and headed by a colleague here at Concordia confirms the secret that I thought might never see the light of day. Wait for it: Students Like (Good) Lectures. GASP!!

Here's the eyebrow-raising part of a story on the study, near the end:

The surprising results showed that students were more appreciative of the literally “old-school” approach of lectures and were less enthusiastic than teachers about using ICTs in classes. Instructors were more fluent with the use of emails than with social media, while the opposite was true for students.

“Our analysis showed that teachers think that their students feel more positive about their classroom learning experience if there are more interactive, discussion-oriented activities. In reality, engaging and stimulating lectures, regardless of how technologies are used, are what really predict students’ appreciation of a given university course,” says Fusaro.

Amazing. Spread the news: gadgets, videos, convoluted, multi-faceted discussion rubrics. All might be useful in certain contexts.... But nothing can replace the old-fashioned lecture for providing the base of a high quality university education.

And, as for the value of good lectures and the person-to-person element of a university education, see this excellent piece from a few weeks ago by U of T professor Orwin: There's no substitute for a real university classroom.

The 'Other Jesus' Industry

One of the strangest things about the latest Jesus controversy (Harvard's Karen King claiming to have in her possession a fragment of a 4th. century text referring to Jesus' wife) is that it did not coincide with either Christmas or Easter. That is, what usually happens with these kinds of things is that some purported 'discovery' just happens to coincide with Time magazine's deadline for its pre-Christmas or pre-Easter issues.

Not this time: the timeline was foisted on us by an academic conference, at which King made her 'discovery' known. The question people are now asking is: did she have any idea how negative the coverage and scepticism would become? Did she know what on earth she was setting herself up for? Not that such scepticism is undeserved.... far from it. The initial comments by King, while circumspect, were clearly designed to entice the public into wanting to see and hear more about this new angle on Jesus.  And, this was when things began to fall apart - more quickly than they usually do.

So, where we stand now is that we're probably dealing with the latest in a long line of fake Jesus stories, which as James Hannam implies, in a nice context piece, is frankly sad. Sad in the sense that people have a lot of expectations about what Jesus means - very much their own (uninformed) expectations, that is. And the western media are all too happy to oblige those expectations, rather than do anything else that might appear stodgy, traditional, not to mention academically sound.

This is additionally weird, because so much of the soundest scholarship these days has to do with the Jewish identity of Jesus, about which the popular media tends to shrug. At least, *if you're looking for* a Jesus who doesn't quite fit the parameters set by the Christian creed, why not write something that picks up on the work of E.P Sanders, Paula Fredrickson, Richard Horsley, Pinchas Lapide, Brad Young, Sean Freyne or Jacob Neusner --- and that's just for starters.  

As for the specifics of this latest Jesus outburst, a real NT scholar (as opposed to a scholar of the ancient world / ancient texts of various sorts), Craig Evans, has posted his summary ruminations on facebook, as follows: 

Is the Coptic papyrus, in which Jesus speaks of his “wife,” a fake? Probably. We are far from a “consensus,” but one scholar after another and one Coptologist after another has weighed in pointing out serious problems with the paleography,

the syntax, and the very troubling fact that almost all of the text has been extracted from the Gospel of Thomas (principally from logia 30, 101, and 114). I suspect the papyrus itself is probably quite old, perhaps fourth or fifth century, but the oddly written (or painted) letters on the recto side are probably modern and probably reflect recent popular interest in Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The decision of the editors of Harvard Theological Review not to publish Professor Karen King’s paper is very wise. Perhaps we will eventually learn more about who actually produced this text.

It's Not about that video

solid analysis from the always solid Ross Douthat at the NYT regarding recent events in the Mideast.

Robert Wright: Creationism and Evolution, the Saga continues

Over at his indispensable Atlantic Monthly blog, Robert Wright reads the tea leaves of latest U.S. polling numbers on creationism and evolution. His analysis, as usual, is pinpoint accurate.