Why kind of sick person takes the ice trays?

Well, it's year two and I'm back in the saddle at the Great Plains graduate school!

Naturally this blog fell apart (as things I enjoy doing are apt to do) once my second semester hit full stride and I began to get submerged in papers to write and student papers to grade. Here's a bit of an update for any who are still keeping score:

1.) Made a massive topic change for my Thesis, from the Popular Culture of German Conservatism during the early 19th Century to American Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in the Plains States (concentrating in either Nebraska or South Dakota. We'll see where the sources are.)

2.) As a product of that topic change, I went to meet with a Priest and ask about local primary sources. I discovered that Priests are very good at stonewalling you if you aren't well known to them (which I am not due to Wal-Mart weekend hours and a lack of weekday Masses). Local Catholic Church 1, Tim 0.

3.) I took a quantitative methods course in order to reinforce the things I learned in Intro to Graduate Study, completing a research proposal examining the political beliefs of Catholics in the Midwest. I still have to look up the formulas for Standard Deviation and things, but at least I've still got my 4.0.

4.) Did I mention I have a 4.0? First time in 13 years.

- In an unrelated note, did you know South Park has been on the air for 13 years?

I am currently getting everything settled for this semester with regards to schedule and classes, and I'm intending to use this blog weekly in order to keep track of my own progress as well as post rough drafts of papers and things. Oh, and take notes/share website that I find interesting during my research. I'm retaking a Historiography course, which is turning out to be very easy. Not only did I take one in undergrad, but my Curriculum project last semester was to create a Historiography course. This is, like, the third time I've read Gilderhus.

I'm also taking a History course on the American West until 1890 and a course on American Catholicism (my second). The latter is an independent study that I intend to use to focus and hash out 20 pages of my thesis, while the former is an actual course that I plan to use to set up the background for my thesis. When all is said and done, I should have about 30 pages (1/3rd) of my thesis written by December, leaving the second semester of Thesis writing in the clear.

So as they say in the erudite world of Professional Wrestling...Let's get it on!

Discrimination Against Christians?

As promised in both my previous post and on my facebook page, I'm continuing my thread on the possibility of Christian discrimination in higher ed. I don't think that I will be able to find a definitive answer, but I do hope to maybe work out why some people may feel that discrimination exists.

As a quick recap- this reentry into the land of anguish was spurred by an ad I heard for the Speak-Up Movement. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to concentrate primarily on discrimination in a University setting, because I don't necessarily feel comfortable branching out beyond that.

While I had a status on facebook that commented on the movement, quite the discussion erupted between some of my friends. This, in conjunction with my readings on some of the "examples" of discrimination on the website, have piqued my interest in what exactly might be called "discrimination."

First, the website.

Looking at three of the main examples of discrimination against Christians in higher education, I'm brought to mind some of the issues that were brought up by Tim Lacy in comments on John Fea's distant post on the subject: "How do you know (evidence)? Are you sure it's not your personality and not your faith? Are you making faith a proxy for your poor ideas or bad writing style? Do you front your faith commitments over reality in your communications? Etc."

This becomes even more problematic when going over other people's allegations of discrimination, and doubly problematic when talking about higher education. Because the standards are set so high for everyone, not just Christians, how can we tell when someone fails because of their Christianity and not their own, secular faults? To put it how I explained it to my friends, it's not like Christians are being ordered off the campuses or shot with fire hoses or anything. For a better example of what I mean,here is one of the passages:

"When I wrote my master’s thesis on Augustine’s distinction between auctoritas and potestas in the City of God, certain passages caused my professors to realize they had been harboring a pariah in their midst. My application to a respectable doctoral program was turned down on the grounds that my application materials were “not universally excellent.” It turns out that several of my professors damned me with faint praise in their letters of recommendation, and my application was doomed."

Found Here

My issue here is that there is little evidence of actual

discrimination. What does the person mean by "faint

praise" in the letters? Was this really a result of that

person's religious views? Was it for other reasons?

Even if the Doctors were to explain their reasoning

behind what they said, and if they argued it was

secular, how can we be so sure that their secular

reasoning wasn't colored by their viewpoints on

Christianity?

Speaking specifically to this example, though, I'm led

to believe that there wasn't actual discrimination based

on that person's faith. This person stated that it was

"certain passages" intheir Master's Thesis which raised

eyebrows- isn't heavy editing and critique what

professors aresupposed to do to their Thesis

candidates? Though I'm still unwilling to say there wasn't

discrimination, I have a hard time swallowing that this

person isn't just having trouble accepting that the

problem may have been the rigors of their own scholarship.

As usual, I plan to continue this conversation later, but for now I think I'll stop and ask what your guys' thoughts are so far. Was the situation above an example of discrimination? Are we even capable of telling what is discrimination and what isn't? Peace!

A quick Post

In a small break from grading, I decided to at least poke my blog to make sure it was still alive.
It gurgled a bit, but I think it would greatly benefit if I were to get back onto my posting once-a-week schedule.

Since I have to get back to grading, I'll just stop and write some notes that I'm planning on picking back up in future posts:

1.) The speak-up movement. It's an organization designed to fight discrimination against Christians. I'm going to try and withhold any opinions on it until I've gandered a bit more around the site, but I have also already made mention on my facebook that I'm a bit skeptical that it would be used to fight real discrimination against Christians, instead concentrating on perceived discrimination (You can't force me to believe that the world is older than six thousand years). We'll see if I can write another post on discrimination and anti-intellectualism without accidentally offending anyone.

2.) This video equals awesome:



Anyways, back to grading. Peace!

Historiography Project

Since I started this blog partially as a place to reflect on historiographical stuff, I thought it might be nice to maybe post a few blogs on this topic. Luckily, for my Educational Curriculum class I get to come up with a course of my own choosing, so I decided to revise the undergraduate Historiography curriculum. At the moment, here are two of the proposals I've drafted for my course:

Course Proposal

For my curriculum project I plan to propose a college-level Historiography course, aiming for something directed towards Juniors with a history major or minor. I'm attracted to this idea because, first of all, I enjoy historiographical discussions and, secondly, I think that a course needs to be developed that acknowledges the importance of historiography for historians and history students. Historiography is a sort-of all-encompassing term that gets applied towards historical methodology, historical philosophy, the history of the historical profession, etc. etc. Yet despite the wide-ranging definition that it has, historiography courses (such as the one described to me at C****** or the one I took at Aquinas College) tend to be rather limited in scope: my Aquinas course was more of a history course on the methods of previous historians and concentrated purely on American issues, and the C****** Course (as described to me), while allowing the student more freedom to choose books and subjects that they wished, concentrated on the student developing a personal historical philosophy without giving any framework for the student to operate within. Neither of these are necessarily bad, but I just don't think they can properly address the main issues of historical study.

At this moment, I'm thinking that this course would be centered around a basic question: How are historians supposed to act ethically? I like this question because it's broad enough to hit the three main points I mentioned personally, while at the same time it's concise enough to give me a bit of focus while I think about how to present the material. It also gives the students something to mull over and produce a product of their own, since I do think that the C****** idea of producing a student's personal historical philosophy is a good idea. I also think that the course could be developed into three main parts: Historical Philosophy, Historical Methods, and Historians in Society.

I just think that this could be really important because historiography is, really, at the core of everything we do as historians. It's what we're supposed to use to evaluate our sources, our teachers, our entire conception of ourselves. Maybe it's because it's my first semester here, and I really don't feel it's my place to blame anyone, but I was really shocked to hear some of the comments being made in an upper-level class that I took with some undergraduates (and again, this isn't limited to C****** . I'm just using a personal example here. Don't want to upset anyone or anything. Go Cardinals?). These students were either unfamiliar with or unwilling to engage the historians we read, and felt out of place without a structured narrative of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened, etc." I'm putting words in their mouths, but it felt as though these students were more familiar with the Rush Limbaugh style of history, the style that says "History is real simple. You know what history is? It's what happened." I believe, however, that this is a style that just doesn't hold up to the modern historiographical trends and that it is important that students be exposed to those arguments.


Project Rationale

Though Historiography is often at the center of what historians do, be it methodologically or unconsciously, my experience is that most undergraduate historiography courses stop short of confronting students with the morally ambiguous approaches to history. At C******, I viewed students who saw history either as an incredibly personal exercise, divorced from its social and plural importances, or as an absolutely impersonal force, devoid of any thoughts or input by the students themselves. At Aquinas College, students seemed to think that good history (something historiography helps us distinguish) had to be utterly revisionist if they were to be taken seriously. I believe that much of these issues come about when historiography courses fail to take into account the broad and multi-faceted questions that historiography forces us to ask: What is history? Why do we study history? What purposes do history serve?

My proposal seeks to address these broad concerns by unhinging the usual scope that historiography classes are given -write a personal historical philosophy, learn the history of the historical profession, etc- and instead broadening it to include as many possible portions. To give the class focus, I'd concentrate on the all-encompassing question: How do Historians work ethically? I like this question because a number of things can be done with it. When discussing historical philosophy we can ask what we really mean by historical truth, and whether we have the authority to present those truths even when they might seem contradictory. When we talk about a history teacher's job in the classroom, we can discuss the use of authority by history teachers in portraying a historical narrative, the politicization of history, and whether or not it is a historian's duty to fight a collective memory or to preserve it. All of these questions come back to issues usually scanned over in historiographical courses, but they aren't necessarily talked about within that context.

Part of this question is “how do Historians work,” and that's another portion of the class that I'd like to experiment with. In creative writing departments, the workshop format is a very popular tool used by teachers to promote both writing and critiquing skills. Part of becoming familiar with historiography is learning how to critique historical writings, and so I'd like to use the workshop format on a regular level to let students critique their peers' papers, as well as get peer-feedback.

I haven't quite worked out any more data at this moment, but once I can get ahold of some more concrete examples of how historiography is taught at C******, I can do more comparison and contrast. I'd rather concentrate on addressing one school because historiography itself is a diverse topic that different schools treat differently, despite it's rather universal importance. For example, at C****** and Maranatha Baptist College (where a friend of mine goes), the end result is a Personal Historical Philosophy. At Aquinas College (where I went), the end result was a biographical critique of a historian. At St. Andrews University in Scotland, Historiography becomes a philosophical study of the nature of history. Therefore, in order to explain and justify my changes at this level, I need to talk with Dr. Boss a bit more. Oh, and it'll also help if I throw my net a bit wider and grab a few more authors in modern historiography- right now Prof. Michael Bentley is my main man, and I'd like to diversify.


==================

So that's where I have that. For the few who decided to read this far, what sorts of books do you think made you think differently about history? I'd love to do excerpts from actual historians writing writings (such as Howard Zinn's A People's History, Goldhagen vs Browning, the usual fare), but what I'm really thinking about are nice meta-historical writings that deal with issues confronting us as historians. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts would be a definite must, and my advisor recommended Simon Schama's Dead Certainties. Any other books come to mind?

Still alive and reading too!

Just a quick update to get back into the habit of writing on the blog. I'm currently spending my last few hours at home before my whirlwind travel plans pick me up and place me back into the western desolation of the great plains. There are many things I plan to miss, such as Vernors, Faygo, and trees.

On that note, I'm reading a book that I hope to talk a bit more about in the future. It's entitled Dangerous Words: Talking about God in an Age of Fundamentalism and is by Aquinas College's English department chair, Dr. Gary Eberle. Dr. Eberle's hope seems to be that "by examining the language we use to talk about God, religion, and other matters...we may become more conscious of how the tremendous powers of religion may be harnessed for good and creative, rather than evil and destructive, ends." His book is directed especially towards liberal and moderate religious people who fall neither in a strict secular humanist camp or the increasingly conservative fundamentalist camp, with the hope that by discussing the various words (among which are Truth, Fundamentalism, Modernism, God, and Religion) that have been coopted by many Fundamentalists, the Moderates and liberals might reclaim them for themselves.

Being a semi-religious person myself (I do not attend church as much as I would like to, but I do carry a rosary with me and identify myself as a Roman Catholic) as well as an increasingly liberal person (I spent time over break reading the platform and constitution of the Democratic Socialists of America, who I then began to actually identify with), this book almost seems destined to have fallen into my hands. In the American political climate, I have felt as though I were a pariah from both sides of the aisle -too religious to be a liberal, too liberal to be religious- and so I certainly relate with a lot of what Dr. Eberle has to say.

That and Eberle is a great writer, being of the English department sort. As a closing note, here's my favorite line so far:

"Poets and novelists invariably cringe when they realize that writing was invented, in effect, by accountants."

Thursday Night Gaff

For the record, I had a wonderful bus-ride home. It never ceases to amaze me the vast amount of people who use the Greyhound system. You get cross-sections from all sorts of American lives: rural and urban, rich and poor, etc. etc. I even saw a blind woman traveling by herself, something I could never imagine being able to do in her shoes. I have trouble enough keeping track of my luggage and which bus to board with eyesight, let alone without.

I also met up with my girlfriend (for the first time in two months) and we saw The Princess and the Frog. It was absolutely great, and I recommend seeing it, even without children!

That being said, I completely D'oh'd on my religious education post. And it was the incredibly embarrassing kind of D'oh, too.

When I wrote the post, I remembered to give kudos to John Fea, who's received numerous kudos' as it is. He's honestly (and this isn't making up for my gaff, he really was) the reason I read blogs period, with his series on Sam Wineburg's "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" getting me interested in the entire concept as a whole. Needless to say, I was excited to see that he had commented on one of my posts. It's like Elvis coming down and giving you rock lessons, or T.S. Eliot critiquing a poem of yours.

Except that I read his comment, then reread my post in light of his comment, and realized I had made an incredibly large and glaring mistake: I had given my kudos to Fea, and then immediately jumped into setting up the rest of my post, which was separate from Fea in every which way except for sourcing him as the inspiration for that line of thought. As it turns out (and Fea pointed out), it looked as though I were suggesting that Fea's school, in opposition to my school, was some Pat-Robertson-esque school (to use my original turn of phrase). My mouth dropped open when I read this, because that was honestly not my intent.

First and foremost, I don't know a lot about Messiah College, so I wouldn't feel comfortable giving any sort of opinion on it in the first place. Given what I have read, though, (from both Fea's posts and comments by some of his readers) I can gather that it is most definitely NOT one of the sort of colleges that I was referring to.

What really brought about that comment, and what brought along that post in general, were comments made to me by a friend who attends Maranatha Baptist College.

From what I can gather, I really need to pound out this blogging etiquette. I'm far too used to a limited audience, and need to start proofreading a bit more. So, as I said in my response comment, I sincerely hope you'll forgive me, Dr. Fea! That flub was entirely on me.

In any case, I will keep up with posts on this topic, as soon as I clear up in my own mind where I want to take myself. If this takes me past Christmas, I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas or whichever Holiday you celebrate!

PS
I was taking another point for granted that I want to just get out and say, for the record:
I do not believe that Christian Schools, even the Fundamentalist Evangelical type, are any less capable than secular schools to be distinguished places of learning. In some cases I think religious schools can be a bit better, but that's just my personal bias (I'm a graduate of Aquinas College, if not already mentioned).

Finals Week Wrapup

It's Finals Week, and in seven hours I'll be finished with my first semester of graduate school. Because of this momentous occasion, I thought I'd take a small moment to give thanks and reflect on the past year. This also means I'll be taking some short time off from my attempt at a series on religion and schooling, which I promise to return to after I get situated back in Michigan for the month of December.

And without further blah blah, here are my observations:

1.) Letters from the Grandma

Families, let it be known: Often, Graduate students who get into school immediately after their BA degree (as I did) do so to avoid "real" life. This implies, as well, that they are not yet completely grown up, and therefore please do not be afraid of sending your cookies, thoughts, family photos, and occasionally twenty dollar bills for pizza money. This is especially the case when, as I am, the graduate student is off in a distant state and farther from home than they've ever been. It is also the opinion of the author that this can continue until the student's marriage, and even then maybe a for a few months afterwards.

2.) Conversations/Games with Friends

Coinciding with the missing-home mentality, I am extremely thankful for my undergraduate friends. At Plains State Graduate School, a lot of the students I work with just...don't have the same mentality as what I'm used to, and my own work schedule leaves little room for socializing in what they would assume are "normal" hours. The little bits of social activity (from Monday Night Internet DnD sessions to our attempt at a Civilization 4 play-by-email game) are just far too great. And the random phone call just to catch up goes along with this.

3.) Monthly Stipend

I've always wondered why it was that the day food stamps came out was the busiest day of the month. I've since realized that this day is seconded by the day that the monthly stipends come out for graduate assistants.

4.) Roommates Sharing Caffiene Addiction:

"Ugh, Tim, I bought this second 2 liter of Mt. Dew and I could barely finish the first. Here, you can have it."

Need I say more?

5.) Blogs by other History People:

Sometimes I feel kinda' uncomfortable speaking to Professors and Doctors on a personal/professional basis. I know they're just normal people, but I've still got that little twinge in my brain that makes calling even my former high school teachers by their first name uncomfortable. Kudos to John Fea and Historiann for being the warm glow of congeniality when it comes to listening and talking to them.

In any case, I need to get back to studying for my last final. And in approximately 17 hours I will be on a bus heading off to East Lansing, Michigan! Woot Woot Woot!