Author Archives: fustianist

I’ll be off in a few minutes to a weekend conference on philosophy of religion at Rutgers, where I’m supposed to comment on a paper about supervenience. Not that I know anything much about the arcana of supervenience. I’m not … Continue reading →

“A married woman should fold one hand over the other at the table, the better to show off her jewels.” – From a NYT article about the resurgence of etiquette education in France. When I read that quotation aloud, Sydney … Continue reading →

Tonight Sydney sat down and taught me basic HTML. Nothing fancy, but he helped me set up a page for all of the links I want to keep handy. A few notable things about this: 1) I, the young’un, took … Continue reading →

Having a chickadee perch on one’s ear feels interesting. Sydney

Name a very prominent American political figure who was born in the Midwest and was a devout evangelical who spent much time on the lecture circuit defending the Christian faith and arguing that religion is the only reliable foundation for … Continue reading →

I just got the student evaluations for the section that I TAed last semester. Here are my favourite two comments from the section on what I should have done differently: 1) “Correct a lot of the crap said more strictly” … Continue reading →

So Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times, apparently thinks that the Christian right should not be tolerated, i.e., freedom of speech and freedom of religion privileges for them should be withdrawn. I gather that the reasoning … Continue reading →

Here in the land of ostensibly severe winters, we’ve been having highs in the 50s and 60s. Forsythias and cherries are blooming in places, frogs are out of hibernation, and the birds are singing the songs of breeding season. I’ve … Continue reading →

In Sydney I’ve discovered a man who is happy to let grocery bills eat up an even larger portion of one’s income than I am – what I thought was an impossible task. Neither of us grew up in households … Continue reading →