Instructor Evaluations

I was going to blog about this a while back, but ended up never getting around to it until now. Last fall when I was in Utah I taught a couple classes at Utah Valley University as an adjunct instructor. For the most part the students seemed to really enjoy my classes and left really positive comments on my evaluations. These two, however, were my favorite:

"SD" means "strongly disagree" and "SA" means strongly agree. The only SD's I received happened to be from this student. In fact the only responses that were less than an N (neutral) were from this student as well. I'm guess it was either one of the students who sat in the back of the class and never did the reading, or else it was a student who had nearly 20 absences and was angry that he was failing the course.

Luckily, most of my other students gave me much higher marks, and left comments such as this:

This, however, was perhaps the best comment I could ever receive:

I totally agree. I do have amazing hair.

The Pacific

Angela and I just finished watching HBO's The Pacific and an hour later I am sitting here still depressed and trying to hold back the tears. I won't say too much to spoil anything for those of you who haven't seen it yet (which I am guessing is mostly all of you). This show is sharp departure from other depictions of WWII such as Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, and instead sits more closely with The Thin Red Line, and perhaps Letters from Iwo Jima. Like the latter films, The Pacific doesn't glorify war or make it a factory for heroes, but instead shows war for what it is--a destroyer of all of humanity.

I can't say that I enjoyed this series. I left each episode depressed and exhausted. It hurt to watch and left me numb. I'm not sure that I want to ever watch it again.

But I guess that is war should be.

Glenn Beck has Nazi Tourette's--Must Watch!

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Back in Black - Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's
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Apologetics and Friendly Fire

Here is a paper I wrote up on Mormon apologetics. Not sure how I feel about it. In order to keep it within the required page count I had to leave it almost entirely conceptual. It should probably be 2-3 times longer, with a lot of examples. Pdf is here.

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Apologetics and Friendly Fire

In his book Religion and Friendly Fire, D.Z. Phillips argues that contemporary philosophers of religion (or “philosophical friends of religion”) are guilty of inadvertently attacking and weakening the beliefs of Christians, whom they have been trying to defend. This happens when they rely on certain philosophical assumptions, which ultimately open up Christian beliefs for unnecessary criticisms and possible defeat. “Apologetics,” according to Phillips, “is guilty of friendly fire when it says more than it knows.”[1] A similar act of friendly fire, I believe, is occurring with Mormon apologists and their defenses of Mormon scripture. In their attempts to defend scriptures such as the Book of Mormon, Book of Moses, and Book of Abraham, they are saying more than they know by assuming that the historical authenticity and religious truthfulness of these texts can be defended (and shown) through contemporary empirical methods.

In this paper, I will show that while the apologists may claim that they are not trying to “prove” the truthfulness of the scriptures, their basic method of defending the texts supports and encourages a view that the historical authenticity of these scriptures can be empirically tested and verified. Such an assumption is flawed because the scriptures as we have them today are nineteenth century English texts which cannot be read and used as ancient documents. Furthermore, because there is no clear connection to original sources for these scriptures, nor did they arise from any traditional process of translation, it would be more appropriate to understand these scriptures as revelations that are religious in nature and which may or may not reflect any ancient primary source. Because of the revelatory nature of these scriptures, the only historical context that they must have is the nineteenth-century culture and language in which they have been given. Thus, any attempt to defend the text with the apologetic assumption that they can be empirically shown to be anything more than that, “says more than it knows” and unnecessarily sets expectations and qualifications for the scriptures. Because these apologetic arguments are not just for the historicity of the texts, but for the religious truth of the scriptures, the friendly fire from these presumptuous expectations can damage the faith of believers when they are not fulfilled. The narrow intent of this paper is not to argue for or against the historical authenticity of these Mormon scriptures, nor is it meant to argue whether or not a belief in their historicity should be had by those who believe in the truthfulness of these scriptures. Rather, my intent is merely to show that the apologetic turn to empirical verifiability is ultimately misguided and potentially damaging to both the scriptures and Mormon believers.

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Recent Reads

Semester is about over. Here are a few more books that I have recently finished:

I'm a big fan of John Dominic Crosson and Marcus Borg. This is a fascinating look at the last week of Jesus and the power structures involved in his murder. 5 out of 5 thumbs up.



Perhaps the most theological of Phillips's books. Starts out strong, though I began to lost interest with the last couple chapters. 4 of 5 thumbs up.



Hardy offers a hermeneutic to the Book of Mormon that I have been pushing for a while now--though he doesn't go far enough. 4 of 5 thumbs.



I wouldn't recommend reading Being and Time; though if you are going to read it I suggest this Macquarrie and Robinson translation. It does a good job of giving a sense of the German and style of writing that Heidegger was using. 4 of 5 thumbs.



Though perhaps more readable, this translation loses out on much of Heidegger's intent and style. 3 of 5 thumbs.



An invaluable tool for first time readers of Being and Time. My only wish is that he utilized more examples and plain language to explain Heidegger's own terminology. 4 of 5 thumbs.



Poorly researched and highly agenda driven, often twisting information to tell drive a clearly anti-Mormon point. Unfortunately it's the only detailed book on the Book of Abraham papyri. 2 of 5 thumbs.

The American People

Another brilliant commentary from Jon Stewart

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American Apparently
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What I learned from Heidegger

The secret to a long paper is redundancy. In other words, in order to make a paper longer, one should be redundant. Having seen that redundancy is the secret to writing longer papers we can conclude that the longer-the-paper the more-the-redundancy. This redundancy we will call "Redundancy", which is how one makes their papers longer.