Political & Social Commentary Posts

The Continued Audacity of Hope

November, 2024

Like many of you, I'm feeling a mix of emotions right now: a strange cocktail of shock but also of familiarity, of energy but also resignation, the kneejerk desire to blame every racist-homophobic-gun-loving redneck who voted for him but also the desire for the Left to take a hard look at itself.

Harris did not lose the election for any one strategic decision, or policy, or position. She was placed in a near-impossible situation, and she and her team did just about the damned best job they could have. Given the hand she was dealt, maybe we were foolish to hope for any other outcome. But maybe not...

Christmas

December, 2020

Now I've worked more from home for my new job than at the office. It's been a full year since I've seen my family back in Austin. My wife and I became home owners for the first time, moving out of a house we shared with our close friends for the last four years, with all of the feelings that entails. We pulled our kids out of public school, tried to go back, then pulled them out again. And one close friend and my mother-in-law are both fighting off the tail-end of COVID this Christmas morning...

Words to Ink

March, 2020

I'm designing a tattoo sleeve of quotes. These quotes both represent and have shaped my life in various ways. I thought I'd share.

There is grandeur in this view of life…

plant sequoias.

Eventually, all things merge into one,
and a river runs through it.

Consider again that dot. That's us, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

...by the better angels of our nature.

You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness...

To Live Savingly

November, 2015

I've just finished reading two essay collections which have refocused my aim in writing: Wendell Berry's latest Our Only World and Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder. Many years ago I decided I could never write fiction: I'm better at articulating my thoughts than I am creating characters. Essays and poems have always been my strength...

The Destroyer of Worlds

August, 2015

One of the years I was studying at Florida State, I taught a History and Philosophy of Science class based around film. Each week we would discuss how a certain film portrays science and its relationship to the rest of human life. This course was one of the more rewarding courses I've taught, and one film stands out as the most thought provoking and revealing: The Day After Trinity. Released in 1981, The Day After Trinity, explores the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb...

Love Thy Neighbor

May, 2015

It seems so strange: how did we forgot how to talk to one another? How did we lose our sense of community, of belonging, of neighborly care? When did we start generalizing, bifurcating, and stereotyping to such a degree that only two, infinitely pliable and immensely dangerous categories remain: us and them? We now speak in nothing but glittering generalities, afraid to say or hear hard lessons built on hard evidence: "there is no insult like the truth."

Nietzsche has a great aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: "'Our 'neighbors' are not the ones next door to us, but ...

Conservatives and Systems

May, 2015

This popped up on my Facebook page last Thursday (note from the future: link broken!). It's a clip from Bill O'Reilly talking about the recent events in Baltimore where he says, "This is not a country that promotes white supremacy… There’s no systemic effort to keep black people down in America...

Memorial Day

May, 2015

Every now and then, I like to sing our national anthem in the shower. It's a tricky little song with music that can be quite powerful, as I'm sure we all know...

"Parenthood" on Race

December, 2014

My wife and I have been watching NBC's "Parenthood" on Netflix. We are a few episodes into the fourth season. For anyone who hasn't heard of it yet, I'd highly recommend it, especially to you young parents out there.

The other night we watched the episode titled "The Talk" (Season 4, episode 4) which had a surprising impact on me. A mixed-race couple—he is white, she is black—have to explain the word "nigga" to their eight-year-old son. His dad works at a recording studio and the son, Jabar, overheard a hip hop artist use the word...

The Weight of History

May, 2014

Several months ago, I asked my students to reflect on the following quote:

I decided not tell them that the quote is from Marx. I had several students who read it and just weren't interested in thinking about what it means...

The Gods of Measurement

March, 2014

Here is a little example of how far behind our children are. I gave a test about the conservation of momentum several weeks ago. It was, as they all are, a multiple choice test. I have Casio scientific calculators in my room for the students to use, and when they plugged in their numbers into the momentum equation (p=mv), the calculator told them the answer was ".1". Now, the answers on the actual test ranged from, "10.0", "1.0", "0.10", and "0.01". I had several students raise their hand to ask why their answer wasn't one of the choices, as they were pretty sure they had done it correctly...

Confusing Economies

March, 2014

At FSU, my professor proposed this question: what if you were invited to a dinner party and brought a relatively nice bottle of wine, something in the $25 dollar range—not too pricey but not too cheap. Then, a few weeks later, when you in turn have the couple over for dinner to your place, they bring the same bottle of wine. Why does that strike us as odd? A gift for a gift right? Or what if they bring a bottle which costs $70 instead? Or $4.99? If your return gift is too expensive, then it can be perceived as showing off or as communicating some kind dissatisfaction with the received gift...

The Beauty and Perils of Unity

January, 2014

On the drive to the high school where I teach, there is a hill which always manages to offer me a splendid view of the morning. This past Monday when I topped the hill, due to the clouds (and probably pollution), the sun was enormous as it peaked over the horizon. It reminded me of something from The Lion King: wavy and red as a smoldering coal. I smiled to myself as I imagined the entire hemisphere spinning toward the sun...

Practicing Utopia

January, 2014

I finally managed to get some reading done over the Thanksgiving break. A good friend of mine lent me Richard Rorty's Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, and it turned out to be one of the most interesting and rewarding books I've read in awhile. It's a serious of lectures delivered in 1998, and it's less than a hundred pages. But A little background is necessary to appreciate some of the details.

Rorty was trained as an analytic philosopher...

The Times They Are A Changin'

November, 2013

A lot of different people mean a lot of different things when they use the word "postmodern." When I use it, I tend to mean something like what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead." That is, objective Truth, perfection, utopia, or the realization of an ideal are no longer our goals in science or society. It means that there is not one answer to life's questions, not one ring to rule them all, not one all-knowing perspective, no "knowledge without a knower." Thinking along these lines has pervaded most of the liberal arts since the 1970s...

Dignity and Reduction

May, 2013

In Finding Neverland (2004), there's great little scene where Johnny Depp's character, P.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, is performing for some children in a park. He pretends to be a fearless bear trainer, and his furry friend, Porthos, plays the part of the bear. But before he begins, Peter, the young realist, played by Freddie Highmore, says "But this is absurd...

Atlas Shrugged

May, 2013

I am no literary critic, but I see the difference between a utopia and a dystopia as this: a dystopia generally takes a particular feature of the actual world which the author finds ominous and extrapolates it into the future, predicting just what society might look like should that feature be allowed to continue its present course. Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship and the freedom of ideas, the film Equilibrium is about the desire to rid humanity of the emotional (and therefore the uncontrollable) side of human nature, and 1984 was about the dangers of totalitarianism...

Too Much Freedom

April, 2013

I've been thinking about freedom a lot these days, mostly due to a strange constellation of recent events. First, this semester I'm sitting in on an undergraduate course called "Religion, Self, and Society," where we read John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill. The course ends with a look at the Supreme Court and its involvement with the Mormons over plural marriage...