Augustine's Political and Theological Realism

One of my colleagues at work, Judy Granberry, is making her way through selections from St. Augustine’s magnum opus, The City of God, with her Adv. English I students. She sent me the following question and what follows is my response to her inquiry:

Adam - What is Augustine suggesting about free will when he asserts that one community of men is "predestined to reign eternally with God, and the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil"? Is this contrary to his argument that by living rightly we may obtain the supreme good and escape the supreme evil?

Oscar Wilde: Harbinger of Matrimony's Decline

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.”       (Matthew 7:15)

Jesus’ words ring especially true of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, for this memorable play is most definitely a wolf masquerading in sheep’s clothing. The mood of the work is light, witty, satirical, even playful, yet it engages in the most deliberate and determined subversion of traditional mores and values of the Victorian age and our own. It is no wonder that George Bernard Shaw penned a scathing review denigrating Wilde’s work as “real degeneracy.”

In Honor of the Devil...

My Speech students have started working on their Devil’s advocate speeches. For those trivia diehards out there, the popular expression comes from the Advocatus Diaboli, a canon lawyer whose purpose was to seek out evidence and make a case against the canonization of any candidate for elevation. Pope Sixtus V established the office in 1587 and Pope John Paul II abolished it in 1983, paving the way for a dramatic increase in the number of canonizations. At any rate, my students will not be attempting to demonstrate the sanctity or lack thereof of any individual; instead, they will have to articulate a position on a divisive political issue from a vantage point with which they would normally disagree.

Waiting for "Superman," Protests in Wisconsin, and Personal Reflections

Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for ‘Superman’” is a trenchant and timely documentary on the myriad problems plaguing the U.S. public school system. The film’s investigation of the deleterious effects of teachers’ unions struck me as especially poignant in light of the recent protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Teachers there shutdown several school districts as they marched on the capital to protest Governor Scott Walker’s plan to limit the powers of the unions.

Clickers for AP MC Practice

I tested out the Clickers technology with my AP English IV class today. The results were a huge improvement over my previous approach to AP MC practice questions.

Autonomous Islands or Constellations of Meaning?

There have been some discussions over the last few years about the possibility of interdisciplinary projects at St. Thomas. Sadly, most attempts at cross-curricular work have fallen flat because curricula do not sync up perfectly across disciplines, assessments are notoriously difficult to craft collaboratively due to divergent methodologies and rubrics, and the school culture seems ambivalent towards interdisciplinarity in general at times.

Living Hamlet

My sweet, auburn-haired, four-year-old niece, Emma Catherine Grace Thompson, was sexually abused and beaten to death two summers ago. You probably read about this tragic story in the Houston Chronicle or saw a report about it on one of the local television news networks at the time of its occurrence and again this past summer when Emma’s mother, Abigail Young, was tried and convicted of reckless and serious bodily injury to a child by omission. A jury found her boyfriend, Lucas Coe, guilty of super aggravated sexual assault of a child just last week. Needless to say, it has been a cathartic and emotionally draining experience for my whole family. We found precious little comfort in the convictions of the perpetrators of this heinous crime; it was truly a pyrrhic victory at best, for what could gratify the heart other than the return of that adorable child in the flesh? And for that, we must impatiently wait until the Day of Judgment.

 

For the most part, I have successfully contained the seething rage lurking in the dark corridors of my heart, but Shakespeare summoned it forth these last few weeks when I revisited Hamlet with my AP English IV class at St. Thomas. The bard’s tale of the brooding, philosophical hero hell bent on revenge profoundly moved me, stirring something long dormant in one of the subterranean rooms of my soul. I can truly say with a greater degree of certainty than ever before that I not only understand Hamlet’s maniacal desire for vengeance, but I absolutely empathize with him. I observed firsthand the deleterious effects that a calm, collected, and unyielding rage can wreak upon the human psyche. Frankly, it’s enough to terrorize the soul because it is to stare into the abyss. Those famous soliloquies were no longer merely poetical speeches but ineffable ponderings of a kindred soul whose heart and mind were so similar to my own. There was a very real temptation among many of the men of my family to act upon our baser instincts for revenge, like Hamlet, rather than letting the justice system mete out the appropriate punishment for those ignominious offenders.