Teach me to care and not to care.
Last year’s corporate slogan:
This year’s corporate slogan (for the Olympics):
Just something about “winning.” Go back and forth between the generous and the selfish at will. It’s all the same.
This is just how corporate virtues work, though. LinkedIn word salad. Diversity then excellence, teamwork then individualism, sophistication then agrarianism, Dionysus then Apollo…
“We assume professionals use certain resources and abstain from using others. A carpenter doesn’t hide his use of a hammer, neither does a cook hide his use of a can-opener. However, if a homemaker dresses up a bakery cake such that it appears she made it herself, and if she accepts compliments on the cake without qualification, she is guilty of deception. Similarly, if a classical Christian school—an institution that promotes itself as a place where thinking and writing are taught well—decides to outsource their thinking and writing to robots, that school no longer deserves to be taken seriously. Can anyone at your school write? If so, pay them to write your copy. If not, tell parents. I’m sure they’d like to know before signing reenrollment forms.”
-from my latest on The Classical Teaching Institute blog
Most classical Christian schools have never entirely sorted out whether they want Bible classes or theology classes.
“Bible class” has become a bit of a catch-all term, much like “Bible study.” I regularly hear students say they go to a “Bible study” where they are reading some lately published memoir about overcoming trauma. It is understandable they refer to such events as “Bible studies”, though, because even “Bible studies” which feature open Bibles rarely include Bible study. Instead, a brief passage from one of St. Paul’s letters is read—it might take sixty seconds or so—and then students share what they think the passage means for about half an hour. In this way, a study of Galatians, a study of a Lauren Daigle song, and the study of an Ann Voskamp book all basically turn into the same thing.
At the Minneapolis airport.
I was supposed to be home three days ago, but I’m smack dab in the middle of the Delta meltdown. On Saturday night, my flight from Minneapolis to Boise was delayed from 10pm to 12:30am, then to 2:00am, then to 3:00am, then it was cancelled. I would estimate that a thousand people slept on the airport floor that night–surreal. I was put on standby for a 10am flight to Spokane, but that flight was cancelled, as well. Since Sunday morning, I’ve been at the Radisson Blu in the Mall of America.
I’m scheduled for a 10:30pm flight tonight, but I’m not hopeful. There are three Delta flights from Minneapolis into Spokane today. The first has been delayed three times, the second has been cancelled, and the last one is the one I’m scheduled for. Not an auspicious start to the day.
I’ve never seen corporate incompetence on this level before.
If you’ve read any of the news stories about the meltdown, you know the problem isn’t lack of planes, but lack of staff.
The reason my flight on Saturday was cancelled was because Delta was one flight attendant short of the legal minimum to board. The plane was there, we could all see it, and we all watched two pilots and two flight attendants check in at the gate then head to the lounge to wait. The departure time kept getting delayed in the hope that another flight attendant could be found.
Four days later, this same problem persists. Delta simply can’t find it’s own employees.
I’ve read a few early think pieces on the matter, and it looks like this will cost Delta at least a billion dollars, although it could be substantially higher depending on what fines the Transportation Department imposes. The federal government stuck Southwest with a $140m penalty for a similar disruption in service years ago.
What if grade inflation is actually a pretty serious sin? What if grade inflation is the defrauding of the public–like counterfeiting or pimping, which Dante consigned to the eighth circle of hell?
Amelie, 2002.
I will be giving two lectures at the 2024 CiRCE Conference in Charleston next week. One which questions the accuracy of “the rhetoric stage” as Sayers describes it, the other which argues Philippians 4:8 (“…whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report”) is an aesthetic theory which is independent of both relativist and objectivist accounts of beauty. The latter lecture will be streaming, so even if you can’t be in Charleston, you can still view the lecture by registering here.
“I would wager that the average classical Christian school is 97% Protestant. Nonetheless, in the miniscule enclave of Catholics, one often finds the most respected student in the school. I don’t mean that all the Catholic students are excellent, and yet I wonder: how many Classical Christian schools have awarded their top honors at the end of the year to a disproportionately high number of Catholics? Quite a few, I suspect.
Catholics are free to argue the reason for this owes to the superiority of their dogma and tradition, but that’s not what I’d chalk it up to, because I would also wager that at pious Catholic schools, Protestant minorities nab a disproportionately high number of honors at the end of the year. Why? Well, a Catholic minority at a largely Protestant school has constant reminders of his otherness, his diplomat status. He feels he is the representative of another world. He knows that when his teachers see him, they think, “There’s that Catholic boy,” and he wants to do his church proud.”
Gibbs in the Badlands.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.