Review: Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age
Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age by Brent Hull My rating: 4 of 5 stars I read this because my wife and I are about to buy our third house and I wanted wisdom. Our second house, it turns out, was very well made in 1948. We already miss it and we haven't yet left it. I wanted to know what made me like this house. Hull helped. He told me about a classical tradition of home construction that, he says, has been nearly lost in America. He told me to build a house (if I ever get to do such...
Never Knowing Where We’re Going We Can Never Go Astray
Read this while poking around the Internet for philosopher Richard Rorty's obituary: Michael Williams, philosophy department chairman at Johns Hopkins University, said Dr. Rorty, one of his mentors, "taught the lesson there are no fixed and permanent foundations for anything, that anything could be changed. Where some see this as cause for despair, he saw this as cause for hope because it meant we could always do better." Now I actually like pragmatist philosophers, because Stanley Fish is...
Who Wrote the Formula?
So one member of a lesbian couple decides she needs a man, and her partner agrees to bring one into the relationship. ABC News has the story. They are now polyamorists, the parents of two babies, and crusaders in the cause of getting their sexual choices and family setup validated by the broader community. One of the women in the "throuple" (this appears to be the default preferred spelling for this neologism, according to Google stats) claims the mantle of anti-racism: We’re just trying to be...
Climate Change and Epistemology
Global climate change is probably my favorite current illustration for the role authority plays in epistemology, and this EconTalk discussion with Matt Ridley explores this very interplay in an interesting and accessible way. Ridley is a "lukewarmer," not a full skeptic of global climate change. His argument against the mainstream view is evidentialist and presuppositionalist. His Ph.D. in zoology helps him, for sure, to dig into climate change literature in a way that I couldn't (and...
Wards Moving to Washington State
The Ward family is moving to Washington state so I can work for Logos Bible Software (now called the Faithlife Corporation) as a writer and theological/exegetical instructor—and so we can help our church's supported church-planting missionaries, Tom and Naomi Parr in nearby Anacortes. There is no way I could possibly thank all the people who have had a positive influence on my life during my eighteen years in Greenville, SC. I believe in the church, because eighteen years in the same one has...