Proper English Empowers: A Response to Oliver Kamm

In his recent Wall Street Journal article “There is No Proper English,” British writer Oliver Kamm calls out grammar sticklers everywhere who would forbid poor souls from splitting their infinitives or using phrases like “between you and I.” He rails against “pedants” who believe that grammatical rules are like life rafts in the shipwreck of the English language, and that ending a sentence with a preposition is all that is needed to send the mother tongue to her watery grave. Language is what we make of it, Kamm argues: “If it is in general use, then that is what the language is.”

"Beyond Textbooks" at Millennial

Millennial, an online journal that highlights the ideas of young-ish Catholics (i.e. "millennials"), has been kind enough to publish my article "Beyond Textbooks: Awakening Students to the Transcendent." It's sort of a composite of some of my blog posts from the fall concerning textbooks and the need for a sense of mystery in the study of literature. Check out the site if you have a minute--it's an excellent collection of young Catholic voices from all different areas.

Reading Merton and Dante

Lent is a great time to read Dante. Against the backdrop of dust and detachment, the Inferno acquires a resonance it otherwise would not have, its tortures and punishments a little more relevant during our pre-Easter introspection. I’m reading it now with my senior classes, progressing slowly from Canto 1 to 34. It’s going slowly, as it should—we probably won’t finish until the end of March.

Reading for Lent

I'm not one to post a link for the sake of posting a link, but I couldn't pass up this excellent and lengthy "listicle" at The Millions by Catholic English teacher and writer Nick Ripatrazone. I have not read much of Ripatrazone's fiction (it's on my own to-read list) but I've become familiar with his work from The Millions and from his trove of interviews with Catholic writers. Like me, he teaches all day and comes home to a young family, but somehow finds time to be a staff writer for a prominent website and publish a few books. Yikes! His list is impressive, to say the least. I hope to keep coming back to it over the next 40 days.

No better way to celebrate Ash Wednesday than by turning to old Thomas Stearns!

How to Think Like Huck Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn often gets lumped with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a middle-school book, a 19^th-century young-adult novel. After all, the two books share a central cast of characters and concern themselves with the often miscreant adventures of pre-teen boys. Yet Huckleberry Finn is a much more serious book, and it has come to occupy a central position in the American canon in a way that Tom Sawyer never could. Twain’s aspirations are different in his later book, essentially a coming-of-age story, a bildungsroman.

Screens and Sacraments: A Pedagogy of Presence

In my last two posts I addressed need for educators to think more seriously about the ways that our students use personal technology in the classroom. The real issue, as I tried to make clear, is that the devices so many students use to read and take notes also give them access to the internet, and thus endless distraction. What should we do? How can schools, especially Catholic schools, maintain the integrity of the classroom, while acknowledging the great tool that technology can be?

Screens and Sacraments: What's at Stake

In my last post I introduced the topic of technology in the classroom and griped a bit about my difficulty in enforcing boundaries on students’ use of personal devices. Now I hope to outline a few points that will better clarify what concerns me about technology use and what doesn’t, and just exactly what’s at stake with this issue.

Screens and Sacraments: A Prologue

            As schools everywhere prepare to begin a new semester, it’s a perfect time for teachers to take stock of the year, re-evaluate their goals, and, if needed, try to start over.

The Year in Reading #3: Mariette in Ecstasy

           

           The third and last book in my 2014 reading I’ll talk about is Mariette in Ecstasy, a 1991 novel written by Ron Hansen, professor, author, essayist, and R.C. deacon. Hansen is perhaps best known for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and his collection of essays A Stay Against Confusion is among my favorite writing on literature and religion. I’d been meaning to read his short novel for a long time, and I finally got the chance over the summer.

This Year in Reading #2: Hold the Dark

Midway through his “Wreck of the Deutschland,” a long meditation on the death of five Franciscan nuns in an 1875 shipwreck off the English coast, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins pauses from the narrative and turns his thoughts inward, reflecting on his role as storyteller:

This Year in Reading #1: What Happened to Sophie Wilder

It is the time of year for best-of and top-ten lists, so I thought I’d add my own version and  discuss, in the next few posts, some of the books I’ve read over the past year. I’ll begin with What Happened to Sophie Wilder, the 2012 debut novel of Christopher Beha.

R.I.P TNR

          Last week saw a mass exodus of editors and writers at The New Republic, one of the most prominent cultural magazines in America, which just celebrated its 100^th anniversary.

Ineluctable Modality of the Visible: Jacques Lusseyran's Literature of Light

     

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Book Review at Crux

Crux, the Boston Globe's new website covering Catholic news and issues, is running my book review of Why We Walked Away, a collection of essays by priests who left the ministry in the wake of Vatican II. I will be doing more reviewing for Crux in the next few months, and will post all links here.

The first quarter is wrapping up for us here at school, and I hope to have another post up here as soon I can get my head above the sea of papers and recommendations on my desk!

The Self as Marketplace

The money changers have come to the temple. The very places where we should be able to encounter our true selves, and, if you're Christian, Christ—our desires, longings, sorrows, joys, hopes—are subjected to the market of free enterprise like never before.

Contra Textbooks

     Continuing on the theme of mystery, one topic I’d like to take up is the use of literature textbooks in Catholic high schools. My experience, both as a student and teacher, has been with the ubiquitous, state-approved fare from big publishing houses. There are many problems with this type of textbook, all of which I won’t take up in this post, but I do wish to talk about one big beef: pictures.

The Realm of Mystery

     

Richard Rodriguez is one of the few contemporary American writers whose Catholicism seems to reside at the forefront of his identity. To give you an idea of his clout in the academic world, he was selected, along with the likes of Frank Kermode, Burton Raffel, and Seamus Heaney, to introduce a unit in the mass-market literature textbook that our high school uses. He is canonical reading for most university writing courses. Perhaps no other writer so accepted by the secular elite openly addresses the Catholic faith and how it has shaped his vision of the world.

Socrates or Plato?

At a used book sale last spring I came across a book by Virginia professor Mark Edmundson, whose name I recognized from various publications (see here, here, and here). Despite the mawkish title, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, hardcovers were only a dollar-fifty, and I took it home.

Mystery and the Manners of the Modern Student

The modern world view, marked by a suspicion of anything not empirical, skeptical to the possibility of transcendence or mystery, is our age’s default perspective. What exists beyond the data points of observable human emotion and action? Our society has no answer. Modernity is the air we breathe, the language we use, the habits we form.

Walker Percy and Writing this Blog

Over the summer I got together with some teacher friends to read and discuss Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, his wildly funny dystopian satire written in the early 1970s. It’s a grab-bag of a book (“everything in it but the kitchen sink,” Percy once told the Paris Review) and I couldn’t get enough of its odd mix of science-fiction, philosophy, ribald humor, and eerily prophetic descriptions of American life in the 1990s, as he imagined it.