Author: John W Gillis

Learning

My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante

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Quote of the Day for Saturday, January 7th, 2012. Virginia Postrel, posting at Bloomberg yesterday in a piece called How Art History Majors Power the U.S. Economy, on the misguided but largely unexamined tendency of many critics of higher education to apply a supposed realpolitik of utility to the evaluation of programs and curricula, becoming in the process shadows of the smug, short-sighted central planners they typically scorn: The students who come out of school without jobs aren’t, for the most part, starry-eyed liberal arts majors but rather people...

Religion & Society

What drives history over the long haul is culture

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Quote of the Day for Friday, January 6th, 2012 – Epiphany. George Weigel, in an On The Square article over at FirstThings.com last Wednesday, entitled The Weakness of Tyranny: With the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, it now seems clear that the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981 was not an act of strength but one of weakness, by a regime so incapable of commanding the allegiance of those in whose name it claimed to rule that it could only compel obedience by violence. It took some time for this to become clear in Poland, a count...

Critical Issues

Same-sex marriage violates the right of the family to protection by society and the state

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Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 5th, 2012. Douglas Farrow, from an outstanding piece in the new (and terrific-looking) issue of Touchstone, entitled Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage? Nail-head, meet hammer: [W]e should observe also that when a family of some description is founded by a same-sex couple, it is always founded by violating the natural parent-child bond that marriage is intended to nurture and protect. It deprives the child, whether in the same way that divorce does or in some more innovative technological way, of its prima facie right to i...

Politics & Economics

“The family is at the center of Santorum’s economic vision”

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Quote of the Day for Wednesday, January 4th, 2012: James Pethokoukis writing earlier today at the American Enterprise Institute’s Enterprise Blog, in an article called: Santorum vs. Romney is a conflict of conservative visions: I don’t think Santorum believes tax reform is unimportant. True, throughout his Iowa campaign, Santorum has, in the words of David Brooks, been “picking fights” with supply-siders. Yet Santorum wants to sharply cut tax rates on labor income, capital income, and corporate profits. Nor does Santorum think cutting the size of governm...

Life in Christ

Note that neither Origen nor Augustine nor Jerome was writing for tenure or to impress an academic audience

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Quote of the Day for Saturday, October 1st, 2011: Fr. Robert Barron, from the Introduction to his book, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master (Crossroad, 1996), on the pastoral character of pre-Scholastic theology: [P]rior to 1300, that is, from the earliest centuries of the church up until the time of Thomas Aquinas, there was no significant split between theology (talk about God) and spirituality. Many of the significant spiritual masters of the patristic period – Origen, Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, Ambrose – were what we would call theologians. All of the...

Culture & Philosophy

The great danger that bedevils any powerful heuristic or interpretive discipline is the tendency to mistake method for ontology

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Quote of the Day for Friday, September 30th, 2011: David Bentley Hart, from an On The Square article today over at First Things, on the inherently epistemologically-limiting nature of intellectual methodology, and the dangers of ignoring that fact: The great danger that bedevils any powerful heuristic or interpretive discipline is the tendency to mistake method for ontology, and so to mistake a partial perspective on particular truths for a comprehensive vision of truth as such. In the modern world, this is an especially pronounced danger in the sciences...

Politics & Economics

The go-to tool for a go-to method of simply killing as many jihadis as possible

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Quote of the Day for Tuesday, September 27th, 2011:   J.E. Dyer, posting over at HotAir’s Green Room, on the implications of the increasing and expanding reliance of the United States’ military efforts in the Middle East on assassination via drone strike: To use this kind of force, the implication is that you don’t need to have a traditional-warfare justification.  Alternatively, you could say that this kind of force – drone-targeting; anti-personnel tactics untethered to the idea of securing a “better peace” – is now a way war can be defined. ...

Culture & Philosophy

It is hard to imagine zero-tolerance bullying prevention without schools becoming mini-bureaucratic-police states

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Quote of the Day for Wednesday, September 14th, 2011: Mary Rose Somarriba, writing yesterday at Public Discourse, on the recent anti-bullying legislation recently enacted in New Jersey (hewing closely to Obama administration policies), in an article called “A Bully-Free World?”: Why, one might ask, would the president lead a conference on preventing something like bullying, which is ultimately impossible to prevent? It could be, perhaps, because bullying is something that everyone agrees is wrong, and it is something that everyone can relate to, because ...

Politics & Economics

She delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment

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Quote of the Day for Friday, September 9th, 2011: Anand Giridharadas, writing in the NY Times on Sarah Palin’s speech at a TEA Party event in Iowa last week: Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it. That is not how we’re primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha. But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea ...

Bible Study Tools

WORDsearch, LifeWay, and the Future of Bible Study Software

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It’s been a couple of months now since the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing arm, LifeWay, announced that they had gotten into the Bible Study Software publishing market by buying WORDsearch – a sale that included QuickVerse, which had just been bought by WORDsearch a couple months earlier. I wasn’t thrilled by either of these announcements (especially the second one), and the passing of time has not made me feel much better. As I mention in the summary of my analysis of QuickVerse, I think the sale to WORDsearch was a good thing overall for Quick...