Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
I have to slap myself to believe I'm reading this: Yet while legacy universities dominate headlines, a transformation is taking place elsewhere, and it deserves more attention. Students are voting with their feet, abandoning the “colds and scolds” of the Northeast for more favorable climates—both intellectual and meteorological. This shift has extended to both public …
Continue reading "Leaving Old Ivy Behind for Kudzu (And Mesquite, and Palm Trees, and…)"
Their Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe repeats history: Since January, the previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in which we participate has essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain. …
Continue reading "The Episcopal Church is Unable, as Usual, to See the Beam in Its Own Eye"
https://northamanglican.com/a-second-look-at-lying-and-the-ethics-of-the-new-christian-right/ The response to Ben Crenshaw's bold statement strikes me as overcomplicated, I have a few thoughts on this issue. It's one thing to say lying is a sin, but to say that lying has no eternal consequences--the ultimate criterion--undercuts the sinfulness of lying. That's built into a number of theologies floating around today. I've …
I've gotten a whiff of a sentiment about the engineering program currently being developed (full disclosure, I'm a participant in that process) at Lee University. I understand that some are of the opinion that it's being brought into the university as a way of moving things to the left. Since I came into Lee in …
Continue reading "A Few Observations About Engineering Programs as a “Left/Right” Issue"
It's done: Late last week, Christian geneticist Francis Collins resigned abruptly as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). On Wednesday this week, the U.S. Senate held a confirmation hearing for a new NIH director, Stanford University medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, a fellow Christian who Collins privately disparaged as one of “three fringe epidemiologists” during the COVID …
The American media's its usual uninformative self about geopolitical issues, but this video puts many things in a whole new light: https://youtu.be/rCBt4XgCX-0?si=-a6e7iUdUwhxrSP4 It makes perfect sense that the U.S. would want to secure its northern frontier against incursion by the...Russians and Chinese, those people who Trump's enemies have convinced themselves he has sold out to. …
Continue reading "The Strategic Issue Behind Trump’s Spats with Canada and Greenland"
Sometimes the most interesting and profound of statements come from some of the unlikeliest places, and this is one of them: it was reprinted in the January 1919 edition of Crane Valve World, the periodical of the Crane Company, the Chicago based company that makes valves and other fittings for piping of air, steam, water …
Continue reading "Something Worse than Monarchical Absolutism"
Teaching at Lee University has brought back memories of things I experienced there before even I was drawn into their fledgling engineering program. Now that we are on our way to a building for same with the woes of the present world for a background, there's something that has come back to mind that I …
The Catholic Church in the US is distressed about Trump's immigrant policies: Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, the USCCB president, said in a Wednesday statement that some provisions of Trump's executive actions, including those that affect immigrants and refugees, "are deeply troubling and will have negative consequences." To which Vance came back: "I think that the U.S. Conference …
The successor of the likes of John Chane takes her opportunity: President Donald Trump blasted Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, after she directed politically charged remarks towards him during an interfaith service of prayer for the country at the Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday, the day after Trump's inauguration. "Let me make …
Continue reading "The Diocese of Washington Strikes Again, and About Those Security Clearances…"
Positive Infinity 