Clipmarks | enbar's Academe, teaching, research collection

René Girard, theorist of religion and violence: links and resources

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:48:18 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Just discovered this list of links. Very handy. Girard is probably the premier theorist addressing issues of religion and violence.

Clip Source: www.theology.ie

René Girard (1923–)

Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R): "Official website for exploration, criticism, and development of René Girard‘s mimetic theory". A good place to start with many links; Includes link to "Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture"

The Scapegoat: René Girard's Anthropology of Religion and Violence: an introduction based on a CBC radio program

Anthropoetics II, no. 1 Special Issue on René Girard: from "Anthropoetics — The Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology" ; very helpful
Interview with René Girard

René Girard on imitatio Christi: an excerpt from Girard's essay "Violence Renounced: Response by René Girard" as found in the book Violence Renounced

Excerpt from René Girard's Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World

rené girard: a presentation from Philippe Cottet (available in English and French

Religion Vol. 27, No. 3, July 1997: an issue related to many of Girard's themes; abstracts of articles available

Tags: religion, violence, theory, method, academe, research, rels327, links, resources

Using blogs in a college philosophy class

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 05:25:33 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: A Penn State professor gives a short overview of his use of blogging in introductory undergraduate classes.

Clip Source: ets.tlt.psu.edu

Faculty Success Story: Christopher Long

Christopher Long in the College of the Liberal Arts teaches “Tragedy, Comedy, Politics” and “20th Century Philosophy” courses. To help students develop their critical thinking and writing skills, he asks each student to create a blog on which they post assignments. The blogs allow students to write for a broader audience than their instructor alone and encourage them to develop a unique voice. Long’s ability to provide regular, dynamic feedback helps students grow as writers and thinkers.

Long said, “I intentionally chose a decentralized model, where each student would have his or her own blog, because I wanted them to have a sense of owning their work. My main goal for using blogs is to get students actively involved in their own education.” The student blogs, as well as blogs Long set up for each course, were created using the Blogs at Penn State.

Students are often asked to relate current events to course readings.

Tags: education, teaching, pedagogy, social, 2.0, blogging, blog, academe

Problem-based learning (PBL) in a biochemistry course

Mon, 26 May 2008 04:15:25 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Hal White of the University of Delaware (a major center for developing PBL strategies) gives an informal introduction to his style of using current and classic research to develop the "problems" that his students will tackle in the classroom.

Clip Source: www.udel.edu

ABOUT TEACHING -- #47

A Newsletter of the Center for Teaching Effectiveness
January 1995

"CREATING PROBLEMS" FOR PBL

Hal White

Invariably students do not understand an article when they first read it. Initially they must define learning issues -- words, concepts, procedures, etc., that they will need to learn about before they can understand the article. Defining one's ignorance is a most important first step in problem-based learning. During the first day of group discussion, students share their learning issues and attempt to resolve them. Those that remain at the end of class become group learning issues that are ranked in order of their perceived importance and assigned to group members to look up before the next class. After several iterations of this process, students demonstrate their understanding by completing a specific assignment such as: Write a 200-word abstract of the article.

Tags: academe, teaching, pedagogy, problem_based_learning, sotl, science, howto

Commonweal on Mark Taylor's "After God"

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:06:00 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Villanova's Bernard Prusak reviews Mark Taylor's latest book. He is critical, but thoughtful. The review is a very good read.

Clip Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

April 11, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 7

The Lord & Taylor

After God

Mark C. Taylor

University of Chicago Press, $35, 416 pp.

When I was a student at Williams College in the 1990s, Professor Mark C. Taylor was the big man on campus, the intellectual figure to reckon with. If a book had been written with the title God and Man at Williams, the man would have been Taylor, according to whom God was dead. Taylor loomed especially large for students like me who came to Williams with faith in God as well as aspirations, or pretensions, to be intellectually sophisticated. For faith in God, at least according to Taylor and his protégées, was intellectually disreputable. Haven’t you read Nietzsche, and Freud, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and above all the French “deconstructionist” Jacques Derrida?

Tags: roman_catholicism, religion, christianity, books, secularism, review, pluralism

Maurice Bloch: religion is a consequence of imagination

Tue, 06 May 2008 05:28:00 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Maurice Bloch produces what sounds on first glance like a neo-Durkheimian theory of religion with a foundation in cognitive psychology. I need to look more closely at this.

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Religion a figment of human imagination

00:01 28 April 2008

Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.

Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

Tags: religion, social_science, anthropology, research, theory, !toread, post:facebook(clip)

A scientist and a mother on plastic baby bottles

Thu, 01 May 2008 04:23:18 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Ursinus College biologist Rebecca Roberts writing on the presence of the compound bisphenol-A in many plastic products for babies. An excellent, reflective article on the dilemmas involved with integrating science in everyday concerns. From PubMed.

Clip Source: www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov

Babies, Bottles, and Bisphenol A: The Story of a Scientist-Mother

Aimee Quitmeyer and Rebecca Roberts^*

My 11-month-old daughter loves her baby bottles and sippy cups (first-person narrative is from the viewpoint of Rebecca Roberts). But as I sit and watch her drink from them, I cringe, because I happen to be a scientist who studies a chemical found in those bottles and cups. I also know that some scientific research suggests that exposure to that compound, called bisphenol A (BPA), is detrimental to good health—something I can't help but think about as I watch my daughter use her sippy cup as a teething ring.

I make daily decisions about what my baby does and does not do, in order to limit her exposure to danger. In both of my roles, I depend on information: nonbiased, factual, evidence-based information. The mother in me relies on my training as a scientist to objectively look at scientific data in order to determine personal choices for my daughter.

Tags: science, health, parenting, ursinus, safety, biology, plastic

The religious studies classroom today (Mark Taylor)

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:22:08 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: The eminent philosopher and critical theorist of religion, Mark Taylor, on the changing climate for religious studies as an academic subject: as people become more religious, scholarship becomes more contentious.

Clip Source: www.press.uchicago.edu

Religious Correctness

Mark C. Taylor

The challenges I face in the Religious Studies classroom today are unlike any I have encountered in more than three decades of teaching. While it has never been more important to study religion critically than it is today, it has never been more difficult to do so. The respect for religious studies has lessened precisely at the time when we need it the most. Whether or not we are in the midst of a fourth Great Awakening, more students are practicing traditional forms of religion today than at any time in the recent past. One might assume that with religion playing such an important role in their personal lives, not to speak of its geopolitical significance, students would be flocking to courses in religion. But this is not happening. To the contrary, it seems that the more religious people become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about their faith.

Tags: religion, academe, teaching, pedagogy, education

The Collegium Budapest, an institute for advanced study

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:13:13 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: William A. Christian, Jr., an eminent but non-academically-affiliated historian, is a fellow there. I am very curious...

Clip Source: www.colbud.hu

Tags: humanities, history, academe, research, organization, europe, funding, to_investigate

Three of my favorite second-century martyrs: Polycarp, Ignatius, Perpetua

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:45:46 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Here's what I'm having students read this week, just in case you're wondering what a true tenured radical does.

Clip Source: www.newadvent.org

The Martyrdom of Polycarp

And as the flame blazed forth in great fury, we, to whom it was given to witness it, beheld a great miracle, and have been preserved that we might report to others what then took place. For the fire, shaping itself into the form of an arch, like the sail of a ship when filled with the wind, encompassed as by a circle the body of the martyr. And he appeared within not like flesh which is burnt, but as bread that is baked, or as gold and silver glowing in a furnace.

Clip Source: www.newadvent.org

The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans

Suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.

Clip Source: www.fordham.edu

Medieval Sourcebook:
St.Perpetua: The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity 203

And I awoke; and I understood that I should fight, not with beasts but against the devil; but I knew that mine was the victory.

Tags: religion, christianity, history, primary_source, violence, post:twitter, post:facebook(clip)

UK educator decries domination of education by management-oriented language

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:26:57 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: An Oxford professor examines the gradual takeover of all policy writing on education by the language of business management: "efficiency," "providers," "audits," "performance indicators," etc. This kind of thinking, he says, has gradually obscured any legitimate answer to the question of what education is really supposed to accomplish.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Lesson one: no Orwellian language

An insightful speaker raised a massive cheer from the audience at an education conference this week.

He urged everyone to stop talking about "delivery" in education and to return to talking about "teaching".

The speaker was Professor Richard Pring, of Oxford University, and he was not just being fussy about the use of language.

His point was that education has been taken over by an "Orwellian language" which has started to control the way we think and act.

Professor Pring is the lead author of a report, published this week by the Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, which looks at how the aims and values of education have come to be "dominated by the language of management".

So when judging schools and universities we now talk about "performance indicators" as a substitute for assessing the quality of their teaching.

Yet this matters because the language we use shapes the answers to the question: "what is education for?"

Tags: education, pedagogy, teaching, schools, uk, news, via:twitter, post:facebook(clip), language

Stuff on Amazon I've been looking at lately

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:52:39 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Just a batch of links and lists. Probably of no interest to anyone. But I want to come back to these. Links also here: http://snipr.com/1yi3g

Clip Source: www.amazon.com

Marxism, Foucault, Religion

A Listmania! list by cnystudent (NY, USA)

Clip Source: www.amazon.com

Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (Paperback)
by J. Carrette (Author), Richard King (Author) "From feng shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, from Christian mystics to New Age gurus, spirituality is big business..." (more)
Key Phrases: New Age, Barefoot Doctor, Tao Te Ching (more...)

Clip Source: www.amazon.com

The Anthropology of Religion

A Listmania! list by Jordan Haug (Provo, UT)

Clip Source: www.amazon.com

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology) (Paperback)
by Roy A. Rappaport (Author) "divine" will signify its spiritual referents..." (more)
Key Phrases: ultimate sacred postulates, rho sentences, material significata, Smoke Woman, Van Gennep, Koipa Mangiang (more...)

Clip Source: www.amazon.com

So you'd like to...
read books about Religions VS Democracy

A guide by Karen W., (Los Angeles, CA, USA)

Clip Source: www.amazon.com

So you'd like to...
read books about Religions AND Democracy

Tags: post:facebook(clip), books, links, religion, research, teaching, academe

Václav Havel's 1994 speech on transcendence

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:35:42 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Inspiring, but also provocative and fascinating. Havel basically insists that some kind of religiousness is all that can "save" us now, though he doesn't really say how or what.

Clip Source: www.worldtrans.org

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

In this postmodern world, cultural conflicts are becoming more dangerous than any time in history. A new model of coexistence is needed, based on man's transcending himself.

By Vaclav Havel

A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."

It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies - it must be rooted in self-transcendence:

The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.

The speech was made in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994.

Tags: religion, postmodernism, politics, international, primary_source, metatheolgy, post:tumblr, post:facebook(clip)

Harvard's decision on financial aid puts other colleges in a tough spot

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:56:03 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Harvard has pledged that no family making under about $180K will have to pay more than 10% of its income in tuition. This makes other college administrators very nervous, since they can't come close to duplicating that deal, especially without raising tuition for other students. One tuition-payer's advocate says it's a step in the right direction because it "puts pressure" on other institutions to start cutting costs, such as in areas of faculty salaries and "internet services," and adds that schools should operate more like businesses. Sorry for the rant, but that's a crock of shit. Only in America, where everything is supposed to be a saleable commodity, and where education is treated as a consumer product, do people go around saying this kind of crap. Why on earth is "operating like a business" a sensible ideal for a college to aspire to? It's not a fucking business, it's an institution of learning. It's not like a Wal-Mart or a travel agency, okay?

Clip Source: www.philly.com

Colleges uneasy about Harvard's deal on tuition

"Most people can't afford to pay for a four-year education without borrowing, and there is no guaranteed pot of gold at the end," said Lauren Asher, associate director of the Project on Student Debt.

Colleges that can't afford to cut their sticker price say they risk losing students to wealthier competitors.

"If a family is being asked to pay $18,000 for Harvard, why would they pay more to go anyplace else?" DiFeliciantonio asked.

James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, said the move by Harvard was a step in the right direction toward reining in costs.

Saying they aren't as rich as Harvard "is a convenient excuse. They can make more targeted use of their resources to hold down costs," he said.

Schools need to operate more like businesses, he said, and look at both revenues and expenses. Areas where they might control costs include salaries for tenured faculty and administrative functions, such as Internet services.

Tags: education, business, money, news, pennsylvania

Slavoj Žižek on the Matrix, #2

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:20:32 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Another Žižek essay, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," from 2001. Also on my reading list. Looks more closely at the images of violence and devastation and their role in the popular, post-9/11 imagination.

Clip Source: web.mit.edu

WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL
By Slavoj Zizek, 09/15/2001

The Wachowski brothers' hit Matrix (1999) brought this logic to its climax: the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real." Was it not something of the similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the "desert of the real" - to us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes in the catastrophe big productions.

Slavoj Žižek on the Matrix

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:16:20 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: This is Žižek's famous 1999 essay, "The Two Sides of Perversion." I'm clipping it because I intend to read it; the bits I've looked at are very good.

Clip Source: www.lacan.com

Inside the Matrix: International Symposium at the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe

October 28 1999

The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion
By Slavoj Zizek

When I saw The Matrix at a local theatre in Slovenia, I had the unique opportunity of sitting close to the ideal spectator of the film - namely, to an idiot. A man in the late 20ies at my right was so immersed in the film that he all the time disturbed other spectators with loud exclamations, like "My God, wow, so there is no reality!"... I definitely prefer such naive immersion to the pseudo-sophisticated intellectualist readings which project into the film the refined philosophical or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions.(1)

The key opposition is here the one between Frankfurt School and Lacan: should we historicize the Matrix into the metaphor of the Capital that colonized culture and subjectivity, or is it the reification of the symbolic order as such? However, what if this very alternative is false?

Clipmarks | enbar's Academe, teaching, research collection

René Girard, theorist of religion and violence: links and resources

Using blogs in a college philosophy class

Faculty Success Story: Christopher Long

Problem-based learning (PBL) in a biochemistry course

ABOUT TEACHING -- #47

"CREATING PROBLEMS" FOR PBL

Commonweal on Mark Taylor's "After God"

The Lord & Taylor

Maurice Bloch: religion is a consequence of imagination

Religion a figment of human imagination

A scientist and a mother on plastic baby bottles

The religious studies classroom today (Mark Taylor)

Religious Correctness

Mark C. Taylor

The Collegium Budapest, an institute for advanced study

Three of my favorite second-century martyrs: Polycarp, Ignatius, Perpetua

The Martyrdom of Polycarp

The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans

Medieval Sourcebook: St.Perpetua: The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity 203

UK educator decries domination of education by management-oriented language

Stuff on Amazon I've been looking at lately

Marxism, Foucault, Religion

The Anthropology of Religion

read books about Religions VS Democracy

read books about Religions AND Democracy

Václav Havel's 1994 speech on transcendence

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

By Vaclav Havel

Harvard's decision on financial aid puts other colleges in a tough spot

Colleges uneasy about Harvard's deal on tuition

Slavoj Žižek on the Matrix, #2

Slavoj Žižek on the Matrix

Medieval Sourcebook:
St.Perpetua: The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity 203