My Semi-Retirement from TRC

I’m announcing my semi-retirement from The Reform Club today. I just began blogging over at American Spectator and am planning to consolidate my efforts over there. They gave me my start in the online journalism/punditry world. It is through work for them that I met S.T. Karnick, which has been one of the great privileges of my adult life. He and I started this blog together. Through it, I have met several wonderful people and have actually gained some professional opportunities in the bargain.

Thanks to my co-bloggers Sam, Tom, Kathy, Alan, Ben, Jay, Herb London, and “Michael Simpson.”

I’m never going to forget listening to Rush talk about Alan for twenty minutes of million dollar airtime. Mind you, it wasn’t for a Reform Club post, but I still felt privileged. Alan continues to have his townhall.com blowtorch.

Kathy had a period several months ago where I thought she was blogging as well as anyone in the game. I couldn’t wait to see what she did next. She’s been in semi-retirement lately, but maybe she’ll reclaim some of the real estate I’m vacating.

Jay came to us after bowling me over with some of the coolest election commentary I’ve ever seen back in 2004. He also provided an extremely interesting Jewish perspective on the whole Darwin/I.D. question. In fact, he joined the blog via comment box writing on that very topic.

Tom got us mentioned in Newsweek’s Blog Watch. Never mind that he was opposing me in my merciless campaign against the Harriet Mier’s nomination! We brought Tom in after bravo performance in the comment room. Confidentially, I think he writes the most provocative posts of any of us.

At least one of Ben’s accounts of international conferencing with the tragically hip crowd deserves to be anthologized somewhere. Tom Wolfe is calling!

Herb London looks more and more prescient as things in the Middle East continue their spiral into some sort of eschatological scenario.

S.T. Karnick is finally threatening to do more of the work that caused me to repeatedly acknowledge him as “the greatest living film (and television) critic in the English language (TM).” Look for him to break out in the pop culture area in 2006-2007.

And Michael Simpson, we barely know ye, but you are clearly a shrewd analyst of what lurks behind the ivy and what lives in the ivory towers.

I’ll be back, but not so often in print here at the Club.

Calling Out Mr. Elliott: What Is a Christianist?

In a comment to a post below, Mr. James Elliott refers to me as a “Christianist.” I would love to have the term defined so that I might know the full extent of my sinfulness as one not worthy to untie the sandals of John Dewey or some other great secular saint.

Please favor me with a definition and tie it to me since I am the one so labeled.

I thank you in advance.

A New Magazine by Christians Skeptical About the Culture

Salvo Magazine is the latest effort by the publishers of Touchstone. Salvo has an intellectual edge, like Touchstone, but is not devotional or necessarily religious at all. It is, however, a wickedly funny indictment of culture with some insightful articles along the way.

I’m telling everyone I can about the magazine because it has exceeded all my expectations. I wrote an article for it and promptly forgot about the project thinking it would be just another throwaway magazine, but Salvo is gorgeously rendered and makes the articles pop right out of the page.

You have to buy the mag or subscribe for four quarterly issues to see it, but I can assure you that the fake ads are worth the price of admission alone. Bobby Maddex has really accomplished something as editor of this magazine and I encourage everyone who wants to see more of these efforts to support it by subscribing for the first year.

Teaching vs. Scholarship

Stuart Buck points out that the traditional view of teaching v. scholarship (that good scholars make for good teachers) is likely not true (or likely not often true) but that teaching might make for better scholarship:

No matter how intensely you study a particular subject, if time goes by without regular review, it’s easy for the details to slip from your memory. But teaching a course inherently requires regular review — not just of your own scholarship on a given subject, but of everything else that is relevant to that subject. If you’re going to stand in front of a group of people and explain a particular legal subject, you have to know the ins and outs of all the important cases/statutes/commentary. It’s not enough to know this stuff “on paper” — you have to know it stone cold, so that you can answer practically any question that students might throw your way.

What’s more, you have to know the subject well enough to explain it to beginners. I think that this requires more in-depth knowledge than merely being able to converse with other “experts.” When you’re talking to beginners, you have to understand the topic well enough to boil it down to the basics. You can’t get away with casually genuflecting in the direction of some abstraction on the assumption that everyone else will know what you’re talking about.

I think there’s something to this. At least for political theory (my field), the best scholars are those who can work their way through a problem and bring to bear a wide range of analytical tools and concepts. There’s a place, of course, for the detailed study of what Locke thought about parental relationships, but if you’re trying to think about how we ought to understand (and capture in law) such relationships, you’re better off if you can draw from a wider range of thinkers and histories. Scholars who teach widely seem to me more likely to do that.

That said, it’s still worth noting that when research universities have great teachers it’s because they want to be great teachers, not because there’s any particular incentive in that direction. For most, teaching is something they “get through” in order to do their “work” (i.e. research and writing). Most try to find ways to minimize the amount of work they have to do for the classes (Ever had a course where the students were doing presentations the last four weeks?) and the better scholars get rewarded by having to teach fewer classes. Until the incentives change, teaching will always be a sidelight, not the main event, at research schools.

Tribute to a Good Man in Africa

When I arrived at Baylor University to begin my doctoral work, one of the first people I met was a dark-skinned Nigerian man named Abraham Mbachirin. Abraham practically lived in our research center.

Our program proved to be quite challenging for him because many of the core courses deal with American law and religion, something he hadn’t understood at the outset. And there was another problem: he couldn’t type. That was a significant problem when students crank out thousands upon thousands of typed words each semester.

He was low on money, had English as a second language, and missed his wife and several children back home. Yet, he fought and struggled. His love of knowledge and yes, of the Lord, gave him the strength to press onward.

Though the enterprise looked precarious at times Abraham never faltered. I’m proud to report that Abraham Mbachirin successfully defended his dissertation today. He returns to Nigeria to build that nation’s institutions of higher education and to continue his role in the Presbyterian church.

Africa needs good men. Godspeed to Abraham Mbachirin. I pray he comes back to us someday as an official of the Nigerian government, more stable and successful than ever. I don’t think Nigeria has ever had a Kuyper, but Dr. Mbachirin might just fill the bill.