Engaging Scholarship Responsibly

Steve Runge has a useful post about responsible citation: don’t “cite and run.”  Rather, engage not only the other scholar’s work, but the sources the other scholar cites.  His examples are naturally from linguistics, but this applies to every discipline.

Aquinas, Clark, and Pearcey

Nancy Pearcey, in Total Truth, comes down rather hard on Aquinas for his supposed insufficient recognition of the noetic effects of sin – so hard, in fact, that she seems to neglect the possibility that Aquinas was right about some things (unless she does believe the Summa is a mass of error).   But in any case, her attitude seems typical of many evangelical thinkers today.  For this reason, I was greatly amused to find Gordon Clark, a mid-twentieth-century evangelical theologian, criticize Aquinas for precisely the opposite reason.  According to Clark, Aquinas refused to admit that the propositions which man knows can be identical to the propositions which God knows, creating an unbridgeable chasm between God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge.  Why does Aquinas postulate this chasm?  Precisely because of the Fall and its noetic effects.  Either I’m misreading Clark, or somebody’s got it wrong.

The Weekly World News and Human Depravity

According to that venerable, reliable, and most respectable source of information, The Weekly World News, the “World’s Worst Villains Were Aliens.” Messages sent from deep space indicate that alien exiles have been sent to earth periodically, and – imagine this! – the dates of their exiles are often the same as the birth years of people like Hitler and Atilla the Hun.

Now, I’m mentioning this story only because it struck me as the latest in a long series of human attempts to believe ourselves better than we really are. Throughout history, we’ve tried to deny that we have a fundamental problem: Cain tried to please God his own way, the men of Babel tried to reach Heaven by their own hands, and in more recent times, the instigators of the French Revolution believed that men were basically good. None of these things had desirable consequences. And now The Weekly World News joins the tradition: humans aren’t really capable of all that atrocity; it’s the aliens’ fault! Unfortunately, the truth is that Hitler is a more accurate reflection of humanity’s true nature – apart from Christ – than Ghandi is. Dealing with our problem requires facing it, not blaming it on aliens.

Reflections on Amazon Vine

A few months ago, I received an invitation to join Amazon Vine.  The program allows certain Amazon reviewers (those who have written a certain number of reviews and received a certain number of positive votes) to choose free products from a monthly newsletter.  The catch?  You must review two out of three of the products you choose before you can order any more.  Most products are books, but there’s a decent amount of electronics, music, and other items as well.  (Today’s newsletter, for instance, contained a $350 digital camera, Rosetta Stone software, and Office 2008 for Mac: all for free to Vine members.  Sadly, these were all gone by the time I got home from work.)  All the products are ones which Amazon wants to hype, and so they decided to enlist their more prolific reviewers to help them do it.

The Vine website lets members know when product inventory (Amazon limits the inventory available to Vine members) dips to ten or below, and so I find it interesting to see what goes the fastest, and how it correlates to Amazon’s regular bestseller list.  Just a few hours after the newsletter went out, all the electronics and music products are gone.  No surprise there.  A book called Sun of gOd: Discover the Self-Organizing Consciousness That Underlies Everything has one copy remaining.  Thankfully, its popularity among Vine members is not representative of its popularity among Amazon customers in general: released on May 1, it currently sits at #186,032 on Amazon’s bestseller list.  Another book, The Marriage Bureau for Rich People, has two left for Vine members: according to the publisher’s blurb, “Alexander McCall Smith meets Jane Austen in this delightfully charming Indian novel about finding love.”  I am tempted to comment that the mere existence of some things is a blight upon the universe, but since I haven’t read the book, I shall refrain.

Not all books popular with Vine members are so bad, though.  I noted several which are unobjectionable, even mundane.  I have no time to indulge in a detailed analysis of the tastes of Vine members as opposed to those of regular Amazon customers, though even if I did, I don’t know what such an analysis would tell us.  All that aside, though, I like Vine, if only because it means I get free books I otherwise wouldn’t.  If only I’d gotten home in time to nab that digital camera . . .

Briefly noted: Christophe Rico and ancient language pedagogy

I first heard of this on B-Greek some weeks ago.  Christophe Rico has written a Koine Greek primer almost entirely in Koine Greek, a feat which should not be as remarkable as it is.  I’d love to get my hands on it, but I think I should push myself through more of Mastronarde first.  The only immediately apparent flaw is that Rico’s pronunciation is Erasmian, rather than Randall Buth’s reconstructed Koine.  (I decided against trying to pick up a new language this summer, contenting myself instead with picking up some finer points of Greek which I’ve missed in the past two years.)

Introduction

This is my second attempt at blogging (my long-neglected xanga doesn’t count).  When I started at blogger.com, I chose “futuremedievalist” for the URL because of my career goals at the time.  Now, I chuckle: in the year and a half which has since passed, my plans have changed dramatically.  I’ve stayed in the discipline of English, but now I want to study applied linguistics and ESL in graduate school, not medieval studies.  And I’ve found out that literature is not my first academic love: language is.  Medieval studies will always be dear to my heart because it gives me an excuse to learn Latin, Old English, Old French, Old Spanish, and Italian, but partly because of my love for language itself, partly because of the job market, I think linguistics (applied or theoretical) is a better fit for me than literature.

This blog might not be updated regularly.  For long periods of time it might be completely neglected.  It probably will be, especially once the academic year begins in August.  But that’s okay, for I don’t mean to blog for blogging’s sake.  I just want a spot in the blogosphere to post my own random musings when I have the inclination, and possibly to provide motivation to write.