Monthly Archives: December 2005

Theirs, Not Mine

So I’ve been wrapped up in family life, grading and a persistent cold since about the 22nd. One thing I did have a chance to do is take my daughter down to Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Betsy Ross’ house … Continue reading

Posted in Domestic Life, Politics | 5 Comments

Precautionary Principles, The Local Version

So among the things we got for my daughter for Christmas was the boardgame Zathura, based on the film and book of the same name. She and I saw the film earlier in December, and she really enjoyed it. The … Continue reading

Posted in Domestic Life | 5 Comments

The Consequences of Representation

John Holbo was kind enough to pick up on my posting about tropes for my Image of Africa course this semester and add a new item, a really interesting one: the extent to which imaginative fictions feel comfortable inventing countries, … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Africa, Popular Culture | 8 Comments

The Africa Beat

Hardly anybody likes the mass media. Everybody likes to beat up on them, use them as an alibi for their own intellectual or political shortcomings. Academics have a particular form of that aversion: journalism appears to many of them relentlessly … Continue reading

Posted in Africa | 4 Comments

Pop Culture Roundup

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the film itself. I was a bit surprised: the movie felt oddly flat. Perhaps because it suffered from the same problem that the first two Harry Potter films had, an overly literal approach … Continue reading

Posted in Popular Culture | 4 Comments

Was That So Hard?

I haven’t written about Iraq for a while, largely because I came to the conclusion that there were no remaining contingent pathways left: things were going to turn out however they were going to turn out. I especially came to … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Unbelief and Imagination

So The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has arrived, and in its wake, much as I would have expected, a fairly vigorous undercurrent of debate about C.S. Lewis and Christianity, both on weblogs and elsewhere. So far the smartest … Continue reading

Posted in Books | 31 Comments

Ethical Intelligence

Swarthmore’s president, Alfred Bloom, talks a great deal about “ethical intelligence” as perhaps the central outcome he’d like to see produced by a Swarthmore education. I like the phrase and I like the concept and I agree with his view … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 9 Comments