Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
So, that happened. Today was my first full-on, for-credit, enrolled-students, part-of-a-formal-module online class. I won’t try to imagine what it was like for the students, but bits of it were easy for me (the parts where I was lecturing/monologising) and parts were more complicated (the parts where I would ordinarily have been pointing to places…
Yesterday morning, Radio Four covered the progress of the government’s vaccination scheme in a feature on the ‘Broadcasting House’ programme. Toward the end of the segment, they interviewed beloved actor and big personality Brian Blessed, who apparently has been vaccinated now. I recognised Blessed from his role as King Richard IV in the first series…
I hope you didn’t tear up your betting slips on my running streak, because it’s up to twenty-one, bay-bee! The weather turned lovely yesterday afternoon, and I decided to run in the afternoon after having skipped in the morning.This was illuminating, since I don’t usually go outside apart from my early morning run (sometime between…
I’ve spent much of the last couple of days populating a database of PDFs of and links to public domain theological sources. St Stephen’s House is looking to modulate toward more thoroughly distance-based teaching, and we can’t assume that our students will have ready access to research materials at their homes; by compiling a library…
I am certain that there are many users of online marking systems who interact with those systems contentedly and effectively. Thqt certainty, though, is an inference from the size of the sample (millions of users) and general probability (lots of people like user experiences that I detest, so presumably some of them are working with…
Glad to hear that the UK’s vaccination drive is proceeding satisfactorily, heartsick that the rate of deaths from COVID is still at higher levels than last April. As Margaret and I keep our heads down, wear masks, stay at home, we’re very eager to get our vaccine. If you know an injectionist with a dose…
Strek to eighteen.
I woke up this morning to discover that David Weinberger has been blogging about ethics and technology. It was almost as though I’d been projected backward in time nineteen years! David sketches two main approaches to ethical deliberation, consequentialism and deontology, and invokes the contemporary ‘ethics of care’ in passing. He doesn’t say anything about…
It doesn’t feel like it, in part because of the lockdown and the concomitant absence of students, but today is the first working day of Hilary Term. I shifted fairly smoothly into administrative productivity despite working in a heat-deprived environment today and yesterday. The heater person came in to replace the fan in our heater…
No, it had to be the coldest day (so far) of the winter that the exhaust fan on our heater went out. That means the pilot light won’t go on, because there’s no exhaust fan to blow the fumes to the outdoors. No pilot light means no heat. No heat means very cold house. We…
Day Four of the US Fascist Crisis dawns (in the UK) on the note that various social media providers have cut off the Presidunce and his enablers. This is probably a good thing, but there is plenty of time for DJT and company, and the various Proud Children and Q-cumbers, to strike again — four…
Today I extended my streak running streak to thirteen days (running in the snow, which is no big deal for my friends in the northern US or Canada, but which borders on madness, madness I tell you, in England). Later in the day I finished off an editing project (with invaluable feedback from my generous…