Adam Bradley > Recent Status Updates

Thinking James K. A. Smith's "cultural liturgies" project owes a big debt to Chapter III's argument that traditional schooling doesn't just have curricula, but also IS curricula.

Intro and Chapter 1 have me worried this will be a fan-service history of Pixar instead of delivering on the subtitle, and I'm not enough of a Pixar fanboy to slog through much more of that.

Introduction is full of the kind of paranoid conspiratorialism and social justice hand-wavy-ness I was hoping the book would be better than. As someone who works on some black boxes, I can confidently say Pasquale gives his bogeys too much credit. This book will be a skim.

Tried to pick this book up again... Dense almost to the point of unreadable, and that's just the Introduction. Shelving it again, maybe I'll give it another go this summer.

First impression, only a few chapters in. Dreher seems to be hanging his hopes on religious tolerance making room for the BenOp to work. Given how many places are already openly hostile to home schooling and intentionally-Christian education models, I have my doubts that such quarter will be given.

There's gold in here, but not enough to make the ponderous "f*** editors" style digestible. Too much offhand dismissal, too much stylized but redundant recapitulation, too much leaning on characters and anecdotes he hasn't introduced yet. Maybe high rhetoric, but style can only carry so much load before it just wears out. May pick up where I'm leaving off after a few months of detox.

Comparing and contrasting with Hooked (Eyal)

Through its example, casts tremendous light upon the paucity of thoughtful arguments in this debate, by its participants on both sides. Absolutely devastating, and not just in the ways I had expected.

Part I was great -- the legal and political history of our transition from a government of enumerated powers to the progressive state.

The wind left the sails in Part II when I realized that if you rule out civil disobedience against the IRS and against agencies with a "halo", there are literally no legitimate targets left for disobedience (at least in Seattle's political climate).

Those schooled in formal mathematics and know that a "proof" and a "proof of the existence of a proof" are different things, and this is what frustrates me every time Wilson brings up paedobaptism; he talks about what his argument would entail, but never just makes the argument outright.

Chapter 13 contains a single paragraph that is both intelligible and recognizably tied to the book's theme.

Chapter 13 seems badly out-of-place with the rest of the book. Skipped and finished, now doubling back to try to penetrate the wall of jargon.

Women's studies: mandatory. Law school and business school: forbidden. Question begging about the content of the telos: presuppositional.

So this one chapter said Christians in the life sciences can't use "war" metaphors ("war on cancer", etc), and then this other chapter said that it's an unchristian approach to the sciences to fail to recognize that all of nature is in a state of war (owing to the doctrines of creation, fall, and redemption).

And neither addresses the elephant in the room: biology's preferred creation myth, red in tooth and claw.

Started really strong, but progressively less compelling over the course of Part II.

Finished the first essay, from which the book gets its title. Tolkien's argument -- that Beowulf's author was a Christian intentionally writing of a past but recent era that was "heathen, noble, and hopeless" -- lends credibility to Douglas Wilson's theory that the poem is a work of Christian apologetics (see the essays in his rendering).