Forum of Philosophy’s recent episode is titled “Religious Art” and it features Mehreen Chida-Razvi, Ben Quash, and Lieke Wijnia discussing the intersection of religion and art.
Educating in the Era of COVID-19: Week 1
The first week of digital/online learning is coming to an end. Monday was a day of preparation and the releasing of some online assignments. Tuesday‘s highlight was meeting with my advisees on Google Meet and posting more assignments. Wednesday was my first opportunity to check-in with my students as each class session became a Google Meet and a good percentage of my students made an appearance. Thursday including posting more assignments and using Google Meet to host our first online Philosophy Club meeting. Today, I did the bulk of my grading for the assignments from earlier in the week and participated in a faculty and staff meeting via Zoom.
I want to return to Thursday. Ten or so students joined our Philosophy Club meeting and they talked about COVID1-9, love, and capitalism (yes, it bounced a bit) for an entire hour. Most importantly, they did the talking. My colleague, Fr. Nate Bostian, and I were the adults in the online room, but they were the ones doing the philosophizing! The students enjoyed it so much that they want to do two meetings each week! Of course, I support this.
I hope all you students, parents, educators, and administrators are doing well after this week. I hope we’re being patient with one another and supportive. I’m sure we’re all trying to do our best during these difficult times.
Educating in the Era of COVID-19: Day 4
Today’s lesson: lesson planning can sometimes take much, much longer when you know you won’t be present with your students to guide them. I’m preparing my students to read through the Arrest, Trial, and Crucifixion Narratives of the Gospels. In previous years, I had the ability to read with them so I could clarify things but this year that won’t be the case. Therefore, my ‘scripting’ (as my wife calls it) has had to be far more in-depth. And that doesn’t even include the videos I plan on recording this weekend where I’ll read through these passages so they can follow along with me.
On the other hand, I can’t complain. Basically, I get paid to study the Gospels, think about the Gospels, and write lessons about the Gospels. Not a bad gig!
This year I’ve been cosponsoring our school’s brand new Philosophy Club. Today at 4 PM (CST) we’re supposed to have a club meeting via Google Hangouts/Meet put on by our student leadership. Should be interesting! I think it’s great that our students want to continue to see each other and interact with each other. Honestly, I’m glad they miss one another. I’m glad they miss school. As it has been said many times: you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
Epistemology and COVID-19
I’m searching for an accessible article or video to share with our school’s Philosophy Club on the topic of epistemology and COVID-19. I see a lot on the topic of how to act like a Stoic during these times but nothing on why trusting experts is not antithetical to being a critical thinker. I’ve got to imagine that someone has written on or created a video about this topic by now.
Favorite philosophy podcasts
I don’t teach philosophy but I do co-sponsor our school’s Philosophy Club. Therefore, I’m qualified to share this list of my favorite philosophy podcasts with you. If I’ve missed a good one, please let me know in the comments.
Favorite philosophy podcasts:
- Philosophize This! — simply a great podcast that’s informative, well-researched, and easy listening
- Philosophy Bakes Bread — a ‘Car Talk’ like podcast about philosophy that always has interesting guests discussing interesting topics
- The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast — this podcast does fun things like dramatize Plato’s Euthyphro
- Drunken Philosophy — just goofy and fun; sounds like two friends discussing Wikipedia articles
- Philosophy for Our Times — very British
- Very Bad Wizards — very long episodes
Honorable mention: Philosophy Talk Starters — basically previews to one of my favorite radio shows of all times, Philosophy Talk, but still just previews (for fans of the show, the tribute to the great Ken Taylor, who just passed away [RIP] a few weeks ago, is available in full)
Recently read: Edmonds’ Philosophers Take on the World
Philosophers Take on the World: Exploring Moral Issues Beyond the News edited by David Edmonds (Oxford: OUP, 2016).
Philosophers Take on the World, edited by David Edmonds (one of the great minds behind the Philosophy Bytes website and podcast), is an easy to read, relevant collection of short essays (actually, a collection of blog-posts from the University of Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog) wherein philosophers discuss recent (2016) news items from a philosophical perspective. It’s fun to read. The authors take tough topics and make them easy to understand. And it’s a book that even someone with the shortest attention span can enjoy because each chapter is only a few pages long.
The philosophers discuss a wide-array of subjects related to ethics including gun rights, stolen artwork, the point of death, sports-hate, adoption, artificial wombs, whether men should be able to discuss abortion, how people use the Internet to shame others, the worth of pets, and whether we should be allowed to erase painful memories. There’s much, much more for the philosophically minded person who likes to read but doesn’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to long chapters.
Wisdom Literature and Theodicy
This is the last week that I’ll be introducing new content to my students of the Hebrew Bible. I end with the Wisdom Literature because it puts a nice, not-so-tidy bow on the semester. As I wrote in my short series of blog posts, ‘Canon and Metanarrative’ (see Part 1, 2, and 3), I center the Tanakh around ‘the traumatic events that inspired the composition, editing, and collecting of many of the texts that eventually became canon‘ meaning that for ‘the Hebrew Bible , my focus is two-fold: (1) the Babylonian Exile, which many scholars see as the period when earlier texts were being collected and edited, and new ones were being created, in order to help the Jews establish their identity vis-`a-vis the Babylonians, and (2) the occupation of successive empires such as the Persians, the Ptolemaic Greeks, and the Seleucid Greeks.’ By ending the semester with the Wisdom Literature I’m able to bring it back around to these events and reinforce the underlying theme of the semester that the Bible is variegated and multivalent. I’m able to show that these Scriptures don’t answer the same questions with the same answers.
Let’s take the question of why Israel’s Covenant God would allow the suffering of exile and occupations. The Book of Proverbs sides with the Deuteronomistic understanding of the universe: there’s a cause-and-effect to living wisely—to living in ‘the Fear of Yahweh’—where, generally speaking, obeying ‘Wisdom’ leads to the good life. The Book of Ecclesiastes complicates this message a bit by focusing on our shared ending: death. Ultimately, what brings together every Jew, Babylonian, Persian, and Greek who walks this earth? Death. The narrator may try to bring the hearer comfort at the end of the book but the fact of the matter is this: Qoheleth, even as he advocates for wise-living over foolish-living, can’t assure his hearer that one path has a better outcome than the other. Finally, the Book of Job, which throws a wrench in the whole discussion. The hearer, seeing the world through Job’s eyes, is confronted with this message: Why ask about suffering and evil in the world? Even if you could speak to the Creator directly the answer would be overwhelming and unsatisfactory. The best answer is this: you’ll never understand all that goes into making this world function including the evil you experience.
And with that, students will end a semester of thinking about our lives in our world through the lens of the Tanakh. Not tidy. Not comforting. Instead, like life, it ends with a conversation where there are multiple viewpoints, none which seem to easily win the day.
The Hebrew Prophets as Philosophers
Last year I noticed that by the time I got to November, many of my Hebrew Bible students needed a hermeneutical change of pace. So, when I got to the Prophetic Literature, I decided to approach these texts through a philosophical lens. It revived the attention spans of many of my students. This year I planned ahead for this part of the semester and I think last year’s experiment was a success.
While discussions on Isaiah’s Suffering Servant or Daniel’s Son of Man may interest religion majors and seminarians, I didn’t get much back from my students when I covered these topics. Instead, I’ve shifted to using the Prophets as a springboard into moral philosophy.
I was inspired by Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture where he sets divine revelation aside to ask what philosophical underpinning can be found in the message of the Hebrew Bible. I took the same approach with the Prophets specifically. My students have discussed:
- Utopianism in the Book of Isaiah: can we create a world where the wolf grazes with the lamb? do we want to try or does the pursuit of utopia turn into the creation of dystopia?
- Divine Command Theory in the Book of Hosea: Was Hosea right to marry who he married, and treat her how he treated her, and name his kids what he named them, just because God said (I teased out this idea with the Akedah earlier in the semester)?
- Deontology in the Book of Daniel: While Divine Command Theory fits better, if we evaluate the stories of the ‘Three Hebrews and the Fiery Furnace’ or ‘Daniel and the Lion’s Den’ then we can ask whether one’s moral commitments should be static, like categorical imperatives, or should we be less dogmatic with our ethics?
- Consequentialism and the Book of Esther: It could be argued that Queen Vashti was the deontologist. She wasn’t going to be objectified by the king and his friends no matter the consequence. Esther seems a bit more relativistic. She hides her identity. She does what it takes to please the king. It isn’t until the end that she takes a great risk but that risk wouldn’t be possible without her previous, calculated actions. It isn’t until the existence of her people is threatened that she becomes a little more like Vashti.
I use the Crash Course Philosophy videos linked above to explain the paradigm within moral philosophy that I want to discuss and then use the Prophetic Literature to illustrate. Maybe it’s a stretch to connect deontology to Daniel and his friends? Maybe. But if we bracket divine revelation (not saying reject…just bracket) then we must ask what makes this text valuable to students across religious traditions and for non-religious students. I think this sort of philosophical reading is a step in a useful direction.
The blog of Brian LePort 