Monthly Archives: February 2010

Rock and Hard Place

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Timothy Burke

When I was in graduate school, I had a strong reaction to Susan Harding’s ethnography of American evangelicals. Partly but not entirely for the sake of argument, I wrote a critique where I claimed that this was a case where … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics | 9 Comments

One Story Is Enough

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Why aren’t individual stories good enough? This is a question that has occupied a lot of my time for the past decade. I have a good sense of why various concentrated kinds of intellectual projects (such as social history) have … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Miscellany | 6 Comments

Batman Beyond

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Going to geek out a bit here, so skip to the next entry (whenever that comes) if that’s not your kind of thing. There’s a good short piece by Allen Varney at The Escapist about some basic story-telling problems of … Continue reading →

Posted in Popular Culture | 12 Comments

All the Information You Need

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve said many times before that I’m sympathetic to families and applicants who find it difficult to get the information they really need to make a decision about where to go to college. At the same time, I’ve suggested that … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment

Is Our Students Learning?

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse calls attention to the curious statement by James O’Keefe, he of Mary Landrieu’s phones and ACORN-pimping infamy, about why he chose to become a conservative while a philosophy major at Rutgers University: his fellow … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments