Some Updates & Links
With my increasingly common sincere apologies
My apologies
I’ve slacked off here quite a bit in recent months. Largely this was because my summer kicked off with a grand adventure, a roughly two week trip to Washington, D.C. In our time in DC, students and I met with alumni in my college’s network, as well as old friends from mine and many others. The trip was excellent, and I’ll likely have more to say on it in the future, but suffice it to say that acting as travel agent, concierge, and chaperone for a trip of that size and length took up a large part of my brain for the past few months of planning, and I’m still working on wrapping up all sorts of loose ends.
So, as has become a habit here when I entire dry periods for writing, I must beg your forgiveness for neglecting this space. I hope to continue chasing down some ideas I’ve been working with for awhile and get back to publishing here regularly over the summer.
Recent Work
In the meantime, I haven’t fully been slacking. I recently published a review of Michael Lamb’s excellent book A Commonwealth of Hope at Ad Fontes, a publication of the Davenant Institute. The book is a stunning work of scholarship, but also a timely work with insights appropriate to our current conversations around Christian nationalism, the possibility of peace in pluralistic communities, and so on. I would appreciate it if you gave it a read!
I also was blessed with the opportunity to travel to the Acton Institute and participate in the Acton Lecture Series. Based on my book project, my talk “The Heart of Machine” focused on Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill’s understandings of what it means to be human and to be free, and how technology or “machine-like” thinking can threaten that. You can watch the lecture on their YouTube channel here. Keep an eye out as well for an episode I recorded for Acton’s podcast with Dan Churchwell, who graciously hosted me at Acton during my time in Grand Rapids.
There has also been a recent trend in reporting on the use of Blue Books for handwritten exams in universities. As regular readers know, I wrote about this topic here at Everything was Beautiful:
Blue Books Will Not Save Us
As an active participant in the debate around AI use in education, I wanted to very briefly touch on something I’ve seen often as a proposed solution to what many are calling the “crisis” we face today. This solution is simple: RETVRN to blue books!
A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor found that piece and phoned me up for a great piece he recently published on the topic. Afterwards, a couple other outlets have picked up similar stories and made use of my piece, including Gizmodo, Mental Floss, and Tech Times. If any of you found Everything Was Beautiful through these outlets, welcome! I’ve been glad to see serious conversation about the AI crisis continue to take place, and I hope to continue writing and talking about it for some time.
Next week, I will be traveling to help facilitate a symposium for teachers of high school civics at North Greenville University, and I have no doubt that the conversation there will spark some writing here, so keep an eye out. In the meantime, thank you to anyone who has read this far for sticking around during my periods where my writing pace declines. Your support keeps me motivated, and it is not unappreciated.