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More Articles in The Blackboard

Loving Education in the Time of COVID

The virus has given us many headaches, but it is also giving us an opportunity as we re-evaluate policies and practices and seek to care for one another and for our students.
October 20, 2021

An Education That Turns on Affection

Alex Sosler compares online and in-person education. Paradoxically, when we embrace the limits of our embodied existence and learn with and from particular classmates in a particular place from a particular teacher,…
October 13, 2021

Why I’m Fasting From Analogies

Education in the age of COVID is an opportunity for teachers and students to investigate the role of language in an intense real-world situation. Rachel Griffis considers the prevalence of analogies and…
September 27, 2021

The Face of Education

As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of Covid on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term “college” implies,…
September 15, 2021

A Comedy with a Sad Ending: #MeToo and Pope’s Rape of the Lock

Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense of balance…
June 21, 2021

Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

As utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" may seem, that doesn't mean we can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind.

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: How to (Actually) Save Humanity

An empathetic approach to the kind of lofty goals named by Princeton’s aspiration to serve “humanity” might empower talented young people to serve their communities rather than selling out for personal financial…
May 24, 2021

Common Arts Education: A Review

In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths outside of…
May 21, 2021

The Liberal Arts for Loss and Lament

The main posture of a liberal arts education is slowing down, rest, seeing. But if we just train students to only strive, reach, stretch for something more, then suffering will come as…
May 5, 2021

The Classroom as Sanctified Space: Human Formation away from the Screen

For the sake of human formation and flourishing, it is essential to carve out sanctified spaces of peace and refuge away from the mesmerizing pull of screens.

Teaching Banned Books: Huck Finn

The censorship of slavery no longer dictates Huck’s morality. Unlike Tom, Huck has begun to question his society’s standards, to weigh and consider what is just and right, and I hope that…
April 9, 2021

Reading Petrarch’s Secretum with College Sophomores

When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they are pursuing,…
February 17, 2021
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