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Ignore this…it will be gone soon.

I’ll be back…

I will be back to blogging very shortly. The last few weeks have been a bit overwhelming in that there has been a tremendous amount of work to complete for my classes. When there’s 60 more required pages to write by the end of the term, writing for fun temporarily loses a bit of its appeal!

Is health care a human right?

What does it mean to have a “right”? I’ve been contemplating this over the past week in the wake of watching congress pass health care reform on C-SPAN on Sunday. My gut level reaction, based on my basic presuppositions regarding the relationship between the individual and the state, is that our society has crossed the Rubicon towards an accelerated loss of individual liberty. Not that either party has had a monopoly on our long slouch towards authoritarianism. Still, I know that many well-meaning people, including many friends, hold that health care is a “right”. I find myself asking, “are they correct”? At the end of the day I simply can’t wrap my mind around this idea.

Real Education: Ability Varies

Reprinted from my previous and now defunct blog…

How does our society deal with controversial ideas? For too many, the first reaction (regardless of our place on the ideological spectrum) tends to be to label those with whom we disagree in order to cast them in the worst possible light. If the ideas of those we disagree with happens to have empirical backing, another successful strategy is to simply ignore their arguments. A great example of this is Charles Murray’s book Real Education. I initially hesitated to pick up this book because of memories of intellectual pressure from my college days: The Bell Curve (which he co-authored) was reportedly the work of a reactionary, and by extension anyone who read and engaged the ideas in a work by such an author was guilty by association.

Surprised by Hope and a few other things

Over the past month in my limited free time I have been working my way through N.T. Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope. This is the first thing by Wright that I have read, and I was quite impressed. The primary theme of the book is examining the ramifications of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. Wright defends a Biblical understanding of the resurrection and debunks a lot of popular misunderstandings in the process. Given that I am currently a student in the academy, I found these arguments particularly pressing. There is a great deal of concern and consternation amongst post-modern thinkers regarding living “embodied” lives, or recognizing that as human beings our lives are situated within our physical bodies living in a physical reality. In many ways this aspect of post-modernism is a reaction against a dualistic split between a disembodied soul and physical body which is more characteristic of Platonic thought than orthodox Christianity. In this sense, Christians have something real to say to our culture on this issue: material reality and physicality are not evil (as Gnostics would claim), but are at the center of our vision of eternity, which will be both embodied and physical. I would agree with Wright that having a proper view of the Resurrection of Christ is essential for living our day to day lives with balance and purpose. This world is not simply filled with cannon-fodder for Armageddon, for us to use and abuse in anticipation of the Earth’s final destruction. Instead, anything done for God in this world, to quote a popular movie, will echo in eternity…an eternity of embodied life in which heaven and earth are joined.