Christian Humanist Profiles

When my students ask me–and soon enough they learn not to ask me–I always tell them I’m an unrepentant left-winger; after all, I’ve never thought that a Capetian monarch should rule France, so once that question is settled, I’m pretty well in place on that question.  Of course, the seating arrangements in the Estats General have come down to us as our lexical inheritance, so I suppose we should talk a bit about the Right.  The good news here is that we’ve invited Matt Continetti to the show, whose recent book The Right gives us a good sense of the tensions that characterize conservatism over the last century or so.

Some truths seem self-evident once somebody has spoken them, but someone needs to make that move.  So here goes: whenever any of us teaches, that teacher teaches something.  Teaching a mechanic how to maintain an automobile’s engine involves things that teaching differential calculus doesn’t, and neither of those is quite the same as teaching Shotokan karate.  Michael Burger’s new book Reading History from University of Toronto Press sets out to explore what it might look like to teach history, and Christian Humanist Profiles is happy to welcome him to the show to talk about that book and that enterprise.

I’ve had a working hypothesis for quite a while now that stories about the devil tell us about as much about an author’s priorities as anything else. Milton’s devils and especially his version of Satan lead a reader into some profound worries about the powers of rhetoric and reason. Goethe’s Mephistopheles can’t seem to keep up with the ambition of Heinrich Faust, and his attempts at temptation are farcical compared to the grandeur of the great man’s desires. And certainly nobody who’s read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters can mistake the features of 20th-century life that stand as the Oxford Don’s pet peeves. Bart Ehrman, in his new book Journeys to Heaven and Hell, examines another kind of story, a set of narratives in which the living have a look at what awaits the dead, and discovers a similar dynamic: what’s magnified on the other side tells some fascinating stories about the struggles of this side. And I’m glad that he’s joining us on Christian Humanist Profiles today to talk about some of those stories.

When I started my undergraduate years at Milligan College in 1995, its interdisciplinary Humanities sequence was already a well-established hallmark of its educational project.  In each of my first four semesters we read history and theology and literature and philosophy and all kinds of texts from different eras, always letting each inform the others.  Dr. Roosevelt Montas’s journey from the Dominican Republic to New York City differs from my own from Indiana to Georgia, but we share a love for the questions that arise from these books and the life of teaching the same.  Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome Roosevelt to the show to talk about his new book Rescuing Socrates.

 I’m still a young enough professor that I don’t remember a time before “critical thinking” was a buzzword in the profession.  Back in the fall of 2000, when first I started, John Bean convinced me that the goal of core-curriculum classes should be to introduce novices to the practices and standards of the university disciplines, and I still think that’s about right.  A decade later, concerns had shifted to helping students engage in metacognition, the examination of one’s own thought-processes, and I’m still a fan of that as well.  But some time in the last decade, if you believe some social psychologists, something went seriously wrong in American epistemology through entire limbs of the body politic, and in response a new call went forth: critical thinking became less a bonus and more a bulwark, something to save us from the idiocy that so many of us invite into our eyeballs through our phone screens.  Dr. Bethany Kilcrease’s book Falsehood and Fallacy engages in that rescue mission at the undergraduate level, using the tools of history to improve our habits of thinking.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to have Dr. Kilcrease on the show today.

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Amy Kenny about her new book "My Body Is not a Prayer Request."

Nathan Gilmour talks with John Dominic Crossan about his new book "Render Unto Caesar."

Christina Bieber Lake talks with Felicia Wu Song about her recent book "Restless Devices."

Nathan Gilmour talks with Larry Shapiro about his recent book "When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People."

Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Mary DeMuth about her recent book "The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible."