When teachers complain about the ways that schools evaluate our teaching–and we do so with frequency and enthusiasm–one of the common refrains has to do with the measuring instruments and their inability to account for randomness and adjustment to randomness. Many a hallway story involves a moment when a teacher’s plans became irrelevant and the teacher responded. Sometimes in these stories we adapt. Sometimes we invent. But as often as anything else, we improvise, a word that we share with the worlds of jazz music and stage comedy. Nick Sorensen has taken that moment and proposed ways to evaluate the work of teachers in more complex and ultimately more adequate ways, and his recent book The Improvising Teacher: Reconceptualising Pedagogy, Expertise, and Professionalism presents his research and some proposals for moving forward more intelligently. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Sorensen to the show.
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Christian Humanist Profiles 274: Bethany Mannon
Ask six Americans what the adjective or the noun “evangelical” means, and you’ll get as many answers. Ask six historians, and you might get twelve. But what if you ask a rhetorician? We’re going to find out today as Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes Dr. Bethany Ober Mannon to the show to talk about her book I Grew Up in the Church: How American Women Tell Their Stories. Along the way we’ll visit and revisit some figures and some phrases that our long-time listeners will remember from episodes of The Christian Feminist Podcast, and perhaps we can add to the conversations that we inherit from them.
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Christian Humanist Profiles 273: Joy Vaughan
Most of the world happens when I’m not in the room. That’s been a guiding principle for me as I’ve read and heard about all kinds of things I’ve never seen. I know some folks prefer David Hume’s assumption that anything that doesn’t resemble closely enough what one has witnessed directly is more likely delusion or deception than real testimony, and I know others would just as soon dismiss the experiences of folks not from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as primitive or worse, but I’ll take Hamlet over Hume on these kinds of matters: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And although our approaches to these matters differ somewhat, I think I found an ally in Joy Vaughan’s book Phenomenal Phenomena: Biblical and Multicultural Accounts of Spirits and Exorcism. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Vaughan to the show to talk about her research.
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Christian Humanist Profiles 272: Rebekah Spera & David M. Peña-Guzman
When Amaziah, Priest of the Shrine of Bethel, confronts the prophet Amos for conspiring against King Amaziah, Amos replies with a very specific denial: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.” And it’s hard to run for president of the United States without insisting early and often that “I’m not a politician.” What about philosophers? What happens when you ask a philosopher whether or not she’s a philosopher? We might find that out today as we talk with Rebekah Spera and David M. Peña-Guzman about their recent book Professional Philosophy and Its Myths from Lexington Books. And even if we don’t, I imagine we’ll find ourselves posing questions about the field that we call academic philosophy that are worth posing.
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Christian Humanist Profiles 271: Rhodri Lewis
Living among human beings gives an observant person plenty of occasions to think about delusion. Whether one watches the young revolutionary or the aging politician, the conspiracy theorist or the devotee of conventional wisdom, human beings take a peculiar joy in fooling ourselves. And we don’t have to limit ourselves to a single explanation of delusion either: Calvin’s workshop for idols and Nietzsche’s clever forgetting ape both make good sense, depending on whom one watches and in which moment. One could even imagine someone wondering, and forgiving the gendered language of his moment, “What a piece of work is man!” And if that last one rings true, you’re already geared up to hear about Shakespeare’s explorations of human delusion, specifically in his tragedies. Rhodri Lewis’s recent book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art puts delusion in the center of the conversation, and Christian Humanist Profiles, with a very clear mind indeed, is glad to welcome him to the show.
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