Mere musings on culture, life, and theology by Samuel James
Samuel James on January 29, 2018 I think it's past time to admit that the hostility we see from college students toward speech and ideas they dislike is a generational issue. I know this sounds like I'm encouraging stereotypes of millennials, and reasonable people are not supposed to talk about any group in that kind of systemic language (well, almost any…
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Samuel James on August 18, 2017 From one Bible college graduate to another, here's a brief word to students beginning their education this month: Do not use your school work on the Bible to replace your personal reading of the Bible. Even the most spiritually helpful class time cannot compare to the cumulative effect of a week's worth of private quiet…
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Samuel James on July 27, 2017 Carl Trueman writes that the oncoming crisis for Christian higher education is a "Waterloo" for traditional religious belief in our culture. Well, yes--and no. Over at the Patreon blog, I offer some mitigating perspective. Here's an excerpt: By calling higher education the Christian cultural "Waterloo," Trueman has invested an enormous amount of belief in the…
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Samuel James on May 20, 2017 Last spring spent about four hours of a Monday night at a college graduation. My wife was being awarded her degree in elementary education, and she was joined by (according to the college president) 995 other undergraduates. Graduates were welcomed, inducted, charged, presented, and awarded, in that order. The night was long; speeches repeated, processionals and…
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Samuel James on March 10, 2017 While reading Charlotte Allen's nice takedown of a fearmongering Washington Post piece about homeschooling, I was reminded again how hard it can be to extinguish certain anxieties. The anti-homeschooling activists profiled by the Post have had difficult life experiences inside homeschooling. That shouldn't be minimized or ridiculed. But, as Allen points out, the rhetoric of these anti-homeschooling crusaders…
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