That Was The Week That Was
This week I was on spring break and did no writing except for a brief check-in on the role Christian colleges play in this year’s installment of March Madness. Elsewhere:
• Were Adam and Eve meant to live forever?
• The anniversary of a colleague’s sudden death reminded Lisa Clark Diller that historians “are society’s professional rememberers.”
• Francis marked his tenth anniversary as pope.
• A Nigerian-American pastor whose church left the Southern Baptist Convention was the centerpiece for a fine New York Times Magazine piece on the tensions experienced by Black evangelicals.
• This preview of a digital archive of sermons by John Stott reminds me why I liked that evangelical Anglican priest so much.
• “When I confront my own weakness and vulnerability,” realized one Christian who struggles this time of year with seasonal affective disorder, “I often have my most intimate encounters with God. I’m forced to more fully lean on God’s grace and rely less on my own will.”
• Both the far right and far left “are wrong. Only a censored and denatured liberal-arts curriculum can be employed in the service of ideological conformity.”
• Academics are understandably nervous about the implications of artificial intelligence for college writing. But there are bigger problems with AI than teenagers committing plagiarism.
• Meanwhile, grading is more and more important, and still uneven and unfair.
• Military history may be in decline nationally, but I can report that enrollment in my various “war” courses remains high — enough so that our department has created a Military & Diplomatic Studies endorsement.
• I observed St. Patrick’s Day by reading Verónica Gutiérriez’s account of the Irish immigrants who defected from the U.S. Army to fight for Mexico in 1846-1847.
• “Journalists benefit from thinking historically,” wrote one reporter for the American Historical Association, “and historians benefit from learning to write for general readers. But there are risks, too, when journalists and historians fail to appreciate the strengths and limits of each other’s endeavors, and end up abusing them—and disserving the public.”