The Record of a Lifelong Learner and Disciple
Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be reading through the list of resources found here on the Digital Humanities. For each source, I hope to write a summary and the start building some work around the lessons I’m learning.
The first entry today summarizes Matthew Gold’s introductory essay, “The Digital Humanities Moment” from the book Debates in the Digital Humanities.
Over the past two years, I’ve been doing more in-conference grading. Students come to my office for a one-on-one conversation about their work. At the heart of this conversation are these four questions… Continue reading “The Right Way to View Grading”
A peer told me his new litmus test for deciding whether or not to pursue a longer work of scholarship: would it be spiritually edifying? Would it help him become a better disciple?
Not simply in content, mind you.
As a process.
Would the process of reading and thinking/writing about his topic help him grow as a disciple of Christ?
In this regard, this quotation from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning has always stuck with me.
“[I]t is everywhere evident in this book that the questions I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself.”
I should not only practice this but teach it. In fact, Greenblatt advocates this kind of full-bodied application of your worldview. Don’t ask of the text something you would not ask of yourself.
I will be incorporating this Greenblatt quotation into my future research paper prompts.
In this short video, I contrast three different body paragraphs.
The first has a weak piece of evidence, the second a weak claim.
The third manages to put a solid claim/evidence/development bundle together.
This week in my Writing About Literature course, we discussed the following passage from Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher’s Literature Through the Eyes of Faith.
In place of the long-standing Aristotelian view of metaphor as substitution, as a process in which poetic words ‘stand in’ for literal ones, we could perhaps say that the metaphorical process is one of interaction. When we use a metaphor, we say that one thing is another. We take a word from its conventional context and apply it to a new situation.
Lundin and Gallagher are at pains to make us see that literal or proper words are born rather than made. Metaphors are language’s clothing. They are language’s body, and the clothing of “proper” words only comes later.
How does this apply to God and Love, the two subjects of the 10+ poems my students read this week?
Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself all summer: what do I do when something I just read left me confused?
(Why do I bring this up after the Earth and Its Inhabitants section of The Discarded Image? No reason. No reason.)
It’s connected to another question: why read literary criticism? Continue reading “Why You Should Read Difficult Books”