Thirty years ago, the most readily identifiable icon of the space race was Neil Armstrong, a reserved and dignified man who observed a brief communion service with Buzz Aldrin while they were on the moon. Today, the most readily identifiable icon of the space race is Elon Musk, who named his child “X AE A-XII”Continue reading “The Space Race”
Author Archives: Joshua Gibbs
How To Not Be Shallow
“You are not too young to begin paying close attention to the world, to others, and to begin asking yourself, ‘What do joyous people have in common?’ You are not too young to pay attention to the words and deeds of your friends and ask what sort of adults they will become if they continueContinue reading “How To Not Be Shallow”
How To Avoid Grading Burnout
“While teachers are apt to chide students about writing papers the night before, many teachers also procrastinate when it comes to grading and returning papers. Students who write their papers the night before rarely do great work, but teachers who attempt to grade forty essays in four hours are rarely doing great grading either.” -FromContinue reading “How To Avoid Grading Burnout”
Finally Something New
I have never (ever) heard anything like this. Uncanny, unearthly, overwhelming. Something new is almost always something old.
To Grade Or To Edit
At the moment, I am going over the first draft of my next book, which has been copiously marked up with red pen by the editor. The following thought occurred to me (during my ninth hour of looking over the proposed edits): Many teachers fill student papers with editorial marks and corrections, indicating that aContinue reading “To Grade Or To Edit”
Bad Taste Is Its Own Punishment
“Modern beliefs about politics, church government, democracy, and so forth are all neatly and appropriately reflected in modern literature, modern music, and modern liturgies. We do not deserve a better culture than the one we have. Every culture is perfectly suited to the music it produces, the churches it builds, and the poems it writes.Continue reading “Bad Taste Is Its Own Punishment”
One Shelf
A reader recently asked what books I would include in a “concise” library which could fit on a single shelf. When I began putting the list together, I had it in mind to distinguish between books I would choose simply because I enjoy teaching them and books I would choose for pleasure. The longer IContinue reading “One Shelf”
Why It Matters If Movie Theaters Fail
“At the moment, it appears movie theaters are on their way out. I think this a shame for the same reasons I think the casualization of church over the last fifty years is a shame.” -from “If We Lose Movie Theaters,” my latest for CiRCE
Let Us Solve That
Christians who are tempted to gaze longingly at the world and regard the world as a paragon of sophistication, all the while thinking Christians a lowly and embarrassing crowd of underfunded fundamentalists, really ought to spend five minutes scrolling through the “Origin of language” page on Wikipedia.
Not Clever
If you’re going to claim one corporate slogan is an informal fallacy, you might as well claim they’re all informal fallacies. For my money, though, no corporate slogan is an informal fallacy, but this is because informal logic have more to do with rhetoric than mathematics. Formal logic is the other way around. I amContinue reading “Not Clever”
