Christian Realism

As many of you know, I’m an assistant registrar at a major West Coast higher-education institution. My job entails overseeing the university’s curriculum and room assignments offices, as well as publishing its general catalog.

As you might expect, at a modern institution in these postmodern times, I get to see some really silly course proposals come through. (One of my favorites was the typo in the course app from the Feminist Dogma, er, Women Studies dept that referred to ‘this curse’ instead of ‘this course’.) Today, though, I’m just shaking my head.

One of the class proposals that came before the university’s curriculum committee was a course titled ‘Engaging Literary Arts’. This is, of course, ambiguous. Is that first word a verb or an adjective? Obviously (I hope it’s obvious), it’s meant to be a verb, so I suggested adding a ‘the’ just after the verb. The faculty proposing the course would have nothing of this. His reasoning? Well, right now there’s a lot of discussion about what actually constitutes ‘the’ literary arts, so to put the ‘the’ in there would communicate certainty.

Um, excuse me, but if you’re going to teach a course about a topic, I think a prerequisite would be to make sure that you actually believe that topic exists. Otherwise, you’re stealing the university’s (and by extension, the taxpayer’s) money, not to mention bilking the students and also depriving them of an ability to know with certainty about anything.

I think this could become a regular column.

The review is up at Infuze. Good book. I highly recommend it.

The subtitle of this one is ‘Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy’ and is an expose of significant liberal/left figures, showing how what they preach is in direct conflict with how they live their lives. This one stands out from others in that the author (Peter Schweizer) doesn’t pretend that conservatives are immune from behavior that is contradictory to their position. (For conservatives, it often amounts to failure to live up to the moral standards that they espouse. How many conservatives are on their second, third, or fourth wife?) Schweitzer’s point is not that it is only the liberals that are hypocrites — we all are hypocrites. Rather, the problem with liberal hypocrisy is that the liberal hypocrites are acting in direct contradiction of their ideas. Take the estate tax as one example: liberals, time after time, preach that the estate tax benefits only the rich and should be kept because the rich should support the poor through this tax. However, many rich liberals have found ways to get out of the tax (by creating trusts, etc.) Schweitzer’s point is not that they’re doing this, but that they’re doing this in contradiction to what they preach: it’s other people who should pay the tax, etc.