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 a certain word should be capitalized, or that a comma is needed, or that a certain sentence is awkward or needs to be rephrased.

However, there is no point in putting editorial marks on student work if the student is not asked to go back and fix them. If the teacher does not require corrections should be made and the work resubmitted, it is a waste of time to point out how things ought to be different.

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. We cannot lament our inability to build a fitting sequel to St. Peter’s Basilica without simultaneously lamenting our complete lack of a theology that might compel us to do so.”

-from Love What Lasts, out later this year

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 I considered the list, the less this seemed a genuine difference.

The Song of Roland

The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius

The Divine Comedy

Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke

Frankenstein, Shelley

Plato’s Republic

Jane Eyre, Bronte

Till We Have Faces, Lewis

The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro

Strangers on a Train, Highsmith

The Road, McCarthy

Stoner, Williams

The Little Prince, de Saint-Exupéry

Frog and Toad: The Complete Collection, Lobel

The Wind in the Willows, Grahame

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Bartlett

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 am teaching informal logic this year and I have collected a number of informal logic textbooks. Each author thinks he is quite clever for going to town on corporate slogans (“Just do it” is special pleading!), but they might as well be deconstructing poems.

Proverbial, Episode 55: Horace the Bear

“In the same way that very few people who have tattoos only have one, very few people trying to buy happiness are trying to buy it for the first time. You try to buy happiness—you buy something— but when it doesn’t make you happy, as opposed to concluding that happiness can’t be bought, you assume it was a swing and a miss and that you just need to keep trying.” 

-from the latest episode of Proverbial, which is available now

Free Lecture: Love What Lasts

“While some Christians still prefer worldview analysis as a cultural hermeneutic, worldview analysis has largely been replaced by cultural engagement. With the ascendance of Emergent Christianity in the years following the World Trade Center attacks, worldview reductionism fell out of fashion and young Christian essayists and bloggers adopted a softer approach to analyzing secular films. Worldview analysis came to be seen as nitpicky, strict, overly intellectual, and overly critical. The worldview analyst wanted to build a hedge of protection around his heart which could keep the world out, but Emergent Christians fancied themselves bridge builders and accordingly styled their approach to secular culture as one of deference, sympathy, and respect. Emergent Christians went so far as to pride themselves on the familiarity and kinship they felt towards the world, even going so far as to claim the world’s complaints with Christianity were an essential aspect of Christianity itself.”

-From the forthcoming Love What Lasts

I have received the editor’s notes on the rough draft of Love What Lasts and am now in the process of revising it before it sent off to the copy editor. The idea for Love What Lasts began almost four years ago with this blog post on the subject of mediocrity. Since then, I have often written and lectured on the subject of mediocrity and commonness. Proverbial was intended as both a lab and a clearinghouse for the ideas which would ultimately become Love What Lasts.

In the next month, I will give a free lecture through GibbsClassical.com on the subject of film wherein portions of Love What Lasts will be presented. Links to this lecture will be sent out through the GibbsClassical.com mailing list. If you would like to attend the lecture, all you need to do is sign up.