The New Testament and Culture

This semester, the students in my New Testament as Literature class are going to be completing a group project in which they develop a literary critical reading of the New Testament and apply it to some cultural situation, text, or artifact.  I plan on writing this essay alongside them.  I thought it would be interesting [...]

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If Academia Operated Like the Professional Sports Universe

The recent Manny Ramirez saga, which culminated yesterday afternoon when the Red Sox traded him for fifty cents on the dollar to the Los Angeles Dodgers, has made me wonder: what would the world be like if academia operated like the professional sports universe? As Peter Gammons has explained, the Sox realized [...]

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Living with War in Watertown

This morning I was reading a section of Nancy Welch’s Living Room (2008),a pedagogical theory book that tackles the task of teaching public writing and writing as resistence in the post-9/11 era of government infringement on intellectual freedom. One of the “success stories” Welch mentions is a new coffee house in my hometown, Watertown, [...]

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The Bleak State of a Career in an English Department

Every year around Christmas time there’s one thing I look forward to getting more than anything else:  my MLA Profession volume.  Each year, the Modern Language Association (MLA) publishes a volume that summarizes the state of scholarship in English Departments and attempts to assess the plight of humanities scholarship.
This year’s issue is especially compelling, and [...]

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Why Can’t the Lexington Media Leave UK English Alone

I hope everyone interested gets a chance to check out Randall Roorda’s editorial in today’s Lexington Herald-Leader.  Randall, my dissertation adviser, condemns the journalistic irresponsibility of local Lexington television news reporter Heather MacWilliams of Channel 36 news, and he also refutes the near-sighted argument of an earlier Herald-Leader editorial.
For those unfamiliar, there’s a backstory here.  [...]

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A Student Thinking Outside the Box

Today I met with a student, who is writing his first essay about the tradition of contradictory interpretations of the death of Judas Iscariot.  Even people who proclaim that the Bible is the literal, infallible, inerrant word of God that does not contradict itself have difficulty explaining the disparity between the accounts in Matthew and Acts.
To [...]

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A Caravan of Camels Through the Eye of a Needle

Many of you might know that I am teaching a class on the New Testament as Literature.  A couple days ago in class, the infamous “Camel going through the Eye of a Needle” passage surfaced, a discussion that illustrated just how weird interpretation of the Gospels can be. In this instance, what does it mean [...]

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Natural Capitalism?

Tomorrow the summer session finally ends, which means that I am done with business writing! My students deserve kudos for completing some great projects. In small groups, my class constructed green business models for local, independently owned establishments in Lexington, KY. The idea of greening business practices has existed for at [...]

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