Growing up, there was always the kid who would roll his eyes at anything. If you liked Star Wars, he would call you a nerd. If you liked football, you were a dumb jock. Teachers were dumb, school stupid, and Christmas for babies. The vocabulary was limited, but mockery was there. Mockery is humor for the humorless. Wit is not needed to mock, mockery being what is left to a wag past his day. Satire and puncturing the pomposity of politicians is a... Read more

Being sensible, we are all for reason and the sane wish to live taking reality into account. Fyodor Dostoevsky agrees, being imminently sensible and magnificently reasonable. “If reality stands in the way of reason, so much the worse for reality.”* A character in the novel Brothers Karamazov forces us to consider what to do when reason and reality appear to clash and cause conflict in our hearts and minds. How could this be? Imagine a court case where all the evidence points to... Read more

This is the true story of Nicodemus Oppie: Cowboy Poet. Recently in describing my childhood, someone said: “Oh. You were a nerd.” Surely this is true and one piece of this nerdishness was the humor. My brother (nerd if I am) and I once ran an experiment at school to see if we could get “telephone pole” to become a thing. We used in every situation: “Oh, telephone pole.” This worked and when a teacher said: “Oh. Telephone pole” to... Read more

American entertainment has reflected over the last few decades a shift from the family centered life to the work centered life. Life takes place in the office, we retreat to our apartment to rest. Younger Americans are moving toward a permanent “dorm life” with many no longer aspiring to buy their own homes. The increased opportunities for work are good. For most of human history, a person knew their future in terms of a work. A person farmed, because almost... Read more

I am from West Virginia, a part of the United States with a proud culture, but not much financial wealth. We created beauty in our music, worship, and handicrafts. Granny Reynolds made quilts whose worth could not be measured in dollars. Yet my grandparents did not learn to make furniture, smith nails, quilt, or cook meals for artistic reasons. They learned at first, because of necessity. If you wished nails to repair the house, then you fired up the small... Read more

Technology allows me to travel with hundreds of books downloaded on my mobile. There are hours of entertainment, movies and games. This is good news. Information and conversation on social media available through an Internet connection means I never lack a dialog partner. Inside of Christian education, however, this newfound power can distract us from the enduring nature of true education. Just as one never would totally replace the live music concert with recordings, so nobody should record a dialogue,... Read more

Do not panic, educate. This is good general advice for every time, even this time when there seems good reason to panic just given the news in our social media feeds. My school parents fear with justification for their children, but this fear can harm the perfect love that should govern their lives as parents and teachers. There is a long history of moral panics: unjustified worry that some particular technology or activity is going to destroy culture. A classic... Read more

Some rhetorical devices come at a cost. A recent series of guest posts aroused the intellectual irritation of Eric Holloway, a sometimes voice on Eidos. Dr. Eric Holloway has a great texts degree, a MSc in Computer Science at the Air Force Institute of Technology and a PhD in Computer Engineering at Baylor University. He felt the guest poster has fallen into several bad arguments. He labels the lot of them argumentum ad snobbinem. With his usual wit, Dr. Holloway makes... Read more

Keep calm. Carry on. Be careful about words and how they can roil us. I once saw a group of academics start to get very heated over the word postmodern until someone realized that the artists and the philosophers did not have a shared definition of the same term. They were both correct in concerns about the other if both had been using the same word in the same way. Beware “science” words imported into other fields. An unfortunate number of people thought the... Read more

Much was anticipated long before the coming of the Christ by the philosopher Plato. He was a father of Athens waiting in God’s Providence for the Christ. He built a set of questions that only Christmas could answer Plato did not know to count down the days of Christmas, but the incarnation came. The Word made flesh gave us the grace and truth we needed to educate without indoctrination or lies. Plato created classical education in his dialog Republic. In... Read more