Academic Writing

A Letter of Thanks

Note: In October of 2008 I presented at my second academic conference. Holly and I went to St. Louis together and spent a glorious few days as grown-ups without our small children (then 5 and 3). We saw the St. Louis arch. We went to the St. Louis Zoo. We bought fudge. And–momentously–we had our first alcohol. Champagne on a whim at the hotel followed by bad beer at a pizza place led two Bob Jones graduates out of a lifetime of teetotalery into the world of social alcohol consumption. All-in-all an excellent memory. This letter I wrote to the English department afterwards captures the professional aspects of the conference. (DL, Sept. 8, 20201)

I would like to express my gratitude to the English department for generously sponsoring my participation at the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference in St. Louis on October 22 to 26 of this year. I feel privileged to have been selected for such support, especially during this time of economic trouble when the university is under additional financial pressure.

Continue reading →
Standard
Politics

Open Letter to Bob Inglis

Note: I was opposed to the bailouts in 2008. During the 2007 primary cycle I had discovered Rand Paul and become strongly enamored of Libertarianism and even more strongly opposed to government intervention of all sorts than I had been previously. I wrote this high-sounding appeal out of a sense of duty and urgency. Looking back, I have no confidence that my position then was the right one. I still believe our spending of the last 20 years has been unsustainable and destructive, and I still believe the core idea that in order for people to successfully self-govern, they must be willing to deny themselves and to embrace suffering when needed. But am much more conscious of how ignorant I was then (and am now) of how the economy actually works. Also, I find my tone of righteous bombast annoying and ineffective–especially given the fact that we were living with my parents at that time because we couldn’t afford our own place, and I depended on the Earned Income Credit every year to make ends meet. This may have been about the time we were on SNAP as well. (DL, Sept. 8, 2021)

Dear Congressman Inglis:

There are greater evils than a major recession, or even a depression. Both my father and grandparents lived through the Great Depression, and throughout their lives I saw the marks of character, self-discipline, and financial responsibility that that dark time left on them. My father and grandparents were thankful people, mindful that the good times should never be taken for granted.

Continue reading →
Standard
Academic Writing

Ninth to Twelfth Grade Latin Textbook Examination Report with Recommendations

Note: In 2008, I took a job as a Latin and American Literature teacher at a large Christian school. The goal was to pursue my calling and do what I loved (teach) while paying the bills and finishing my doctoral dissertation. Practically my first official task was to select the textbooks and develop the scope and sequence for the high-school Latin program. The school already had middle-school Latin and one of the reasons I was hired (instead of a pure literature teacher) was to establish a high-school Latin program. I prepared this textbook review as part of that process. Looking back, I’m impressed by this. I’d forgotten how thorough and clear it was. It should be clear to anyone who reads it how heavily my approach to Latin pedagogy leaned on grammar and vocab study. That kind of study is not easy work, and it’s hard to sell to students these days (and perhaps rightly so, but that’s a different conversation). But I still believe if you’re going to study a dead language, the best way to do it is the old-fashioned way. Those Renaissance schoolmasters knew what they were about when it came to teaching Latin to young people. (DL, Sept. 8, 2021)

Goal:

The purpose of the examination process is to select a multi-year Latin curriculum for grades nine through twelve. Upon adoption, the first-year course will be held in 2008-09, with successive courses added each year until the complete cycle has been implemented.

Continue reading →
Standard
Politics

Just Words 1.2: The Atheist Betrayal

Note: This is the second post I wrote for the short-lived anonymous activist blog I started in early 2007 dedicated to strident Christian politics. It had been four years since I first heard of the concept of gay marriage, and I could see clearly which way the cultural winds were blowing. This was my attempt to fight for the culturally-Christian America of my youth. As described in the note to the first blog article, within a few months of starting the blog, I began to move away from Christian militancy and towards Libertarianism, motivated by the campaign of Ron Paul. Nevertheless, though my methods and political priorities have changed, I think the argument here is basically sound, as the continual encroachment of radical progressive fundamentalism throughout the West has shown. (DL, June 10, 2023). 

Judge Wolf’s ruling is . . . a treacherous collaboration with the evil empire which, though fallen in its Soviet form, lives yet in the ideology of godlessness that has been appropriated into the halls of American justice.
-Just Words 1.1

American Christians must wake up.

They must awaken to the imminent threats facing their civil and religious liberties–threats which cannot be overstated. There are forces at work in this country that are wholly dedicated to stamping out the social influence of America’s biblical heritage and of America’s Christians.  Their watchword is “tolerance,” but these are nothing less then the uncompromising partisans of a god-less ideology.

Continue reading →
Standard
Politics

Just Words 1.1: The Coming Oppression

Note: At the beginning of 2007 I started a short-lived blog. My most immediate inspirations were twofold: 1) a couple of my friends had blogs I enjoyed reading, and 2) I was inspired by the example of Demosthenes and Locke in Ender’s Game, anonymous online commentators who by the power of their words were able to influence society. My blog was hosted at arthegall.com and was anonymous. The articles I posted there were the most strident pieces of political activism I have ever written. At the time I was deeply invested in electing Christian politicians and establishing Christian values in society by fiat. However over the course of the 2008 election cycle my views moderated, and I became a libertarian, shifting from strong support for Alan Keyes to strong support for Ron Paul. In addition, not long after starting the blog I joined Facebook which became for fifteen years my primary mode of online expression. The blog petered out after only a few posts. (DL, June 7, 2023).

The ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets, but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.
-Ronald Reagan

As you value your lives, your families, and your freedom, hear this:

Christians are today, this moment, in grave and imminent danger of having their civil liberties stripped from them by the U.S. government unless they forsake tenets of their faith that the state has now deemed incompatible with “engaged and productive citizens” (ruling ). Indeed, even now the shackles are being forged about their throats—while they sleep.

Continue reading →
Standard
Poetry

Winter Love

That winter night when snow upon the ground
lay thick, we joined our hands, exchanging vows.
And now five winters gone the sixth comes round,
and winter’s snow begins to gather on our brows.
The winter wind that froze Big Cedar Creek
beside the church five years ago still blows,
but now its creeping fingers try to sneak
and snuff the love that warm within us glows.
It’s bitter cold, that wind that blows without;
more bitter still with cold our hearts become
when gusts blow through the chinks and swirl about.
But still I will rejoice; for fingers numb
from cold will ever thaw before the fire,
and He who lit and keeps our flame will never tire.

Continue reading →
Standard
Academic Writing

Theodore Parker: Gendarme of the Revolution

Note: This was my final paper for EN 841B: Transcendentalism, a seminar I took in the Fall of 2005 with Laura Dassow Walls, now of Notre Dame. It was a fascinating class with an excellent professor and a great text. I enjoyed writing this paper and in the process learned a lot about a topic that was of great personal interest at the time–America’s ideological history. The Fall of 2005 was a crazy semester in which I bit off far more than I could chew, so I took an Incomplete on this course and didn’t finish this paper till a year later in the Fall of 2006.

In recent years the ongoing revolution in American cultural life has become increasingly apparent. Best-selling books like Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior (and the controversy surrounding them) have underscored the increasing secularization and liberalization of a culture that was once decidedly Judeo-Christian in moral tone and worldview. And while this revolution has dramatically increased in rapidity and scope in recent decades, any student of American letters knows that cultural controversy and change is not a new phenomenon in America. Indeed, between the 1631 ruling of the general court of the Massachusetts Bay colony “that no man [should] be admitted to the freedom of [the] body politic, but such as [were] members of some of the churches within the limits of the same” and the 2003 ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court “that barring an individual from . . . marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution,” one can trace an almost regular series of controversial moments that have become landmarks in the history of America’s cultural revolution: the Half Way covenant of 1662, the print debates between Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncy in 1743 and the accompanying schism in Congregationalism, the 1805 appointment of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, Emerson’s 1838 address at the Harvard Divinity School, Charles Briggs’ 1891 inaugural address at Union Theological Seminary and his subsequent heresy trials, the 1925 Scopes trial, and the Supreme Court rulings on the Bible and prayer in the public schools in 1962-3. It is no coincidence that almost all of these controversies have been wholly religious in nature; before cultural practice can change, ideology must change. Change in belief paves the way for change in behavior. Neither is it a coincidence that the conservative faction in most of these crisis moments has espoused an ideology virtually identical to that of the Puritan divines of 1631 Massachusetts. For in a real sense, the history of America’s cultural revolution is the story of how the conservative Christian orthodoxy[1] of Massachusetts Bay (with its concomitant rules of behavior) has been gradually moved from the halls of power to the margins of society, challenged in each new generation by new foes in new spheres until finally those who will and can claim their ideological inheritance from the original Puritan divines are a fringe few, increasingly seen as narrow and extreme even in Christian circles.

Continue reading →
Standard
Poetry

Quantitative Metrical Experinment

Note: I wrote some time in October during the semester I took LATN 504: Horace at Carolina. Poetic meters in English are typically qualitative. That is, they establish a rhythm by arranging syllables based on their quality (stressed or unstressed). They do this because stress accent is a primary characteristic of all English syllables. (Compare “hunger” and “afloat”; both are two syllable words, but they have opposite stress accent.) Classical Greek and Latin poetic meters by contract are typically quantitative. They establish a rhythm by arranging syllables based on their length in time–how long they take to say. They can do this because their long vowels literally take twice as long to say as their short ones. Because quantitative meter is time-based, it’s much more a proper, music-like rhythm than quantitative meter. Many poets have tried to replicate quantitative meter in English, but because there’s no true time-based distinction between our long and short syllables, it’s hard to do. This is in an Alcaic stanza. (DL, Dec. 10, 2022)

Boy, sound your hornsong clearly across the field.
Man, raise your swordblade high and your brilliant shield.
Fix fast your bright helms; fierce your might wield.
Stand in the breech for your homes and don’t yield.

Continue reading →
Standard
Academic Writing

Form and Structure in The Rape of Lucrece

Note: In July of 2001 after finishing my MA in English at Bob Jones University, my parents sponsored my attendance at Cambridge University’s International Shakespeare Summer Program, a non-credit continuing education program for anyone above 18. There I had the privilege and delight of learning from a brilliant scholar-teacher, Charles Moseley. Dr. Moseley fit every ideal I had for the perfect literary scholar–breadth of learning, erudition, stylish good looks (complete with coat and tie and a white goatee), and a British accent. It was like learning from someone from the same circle as Tolkien and Lewis, and it was mesmerizing. He said kind words during our interactions about my suitability for doctoral study and validated the quality of the literary education I had received at BJU that left a lasting mark of encouragement. I wrote this paper for his three-week class on Shakespeare’s poetry. A major portion of the argument is a direct response to something he had said in class about the structure of Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece. The paper was written with him as the primary audience. Looking back, it is typical of an approach I used often in my literary analyses–direct analysis of the structure and purpose of the text, a method similar to that used in explicating the meaning of the Bible. (DL, Sept. 19, 2021)

To discuss the importance of form and structure[1] in The Rape of Lucrece we have to know what we mean by “importance.”For our purposes here, importance signifies how large a role form and structure play in getting the poem to do what Shakespeare wanted it to do; it is a measure of how integral they are to the poem’s success as Shakespeare would have defined success. I begin, therefore, with a brief statement of what Shakespeare wanted Lucrece to do.

It is clear from the poem’s dedicatory epistle and from the historical context surrounding the poem’s composition that Shakespeare wrote Lucrece to impress an educated, courtly audience already very familiar with his subject matter—to impress them with his skill as a poet. In addition, it is reasonable to assume based on the Renaissance uses for poetry and modes of reading poetry that Shakespeare was also trying to say something significant. If accomplishing these two goals is taken as the measure of the poem’s success, it is to be expected that form and structure will be important insofar as they are avenues for impressive technical display and/or communicative tools.

Continue reading →
Standard
Academic Writing

Virtual Morality (2)

Making real choices in a virtual world

Note: This is the second of two papers on similar themes. (Read the first here.) I wrote both in the second year of my MA in English at Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist Christian school I attended for my BA and MA. Both capture well the moral tenor of my upbringing and of my beliefs at that time. I was raised in evangelicalism and on a diet of Rush Limbaugh. But since that time and these writings, some of my views have changed in important ways. At the time I wrote this paper, the term “sexual preference” was still commonly used throughout society to refer to a person’s sexual orientation, and it would be ten more years before reading Andrew Sullivan opened my eyes to the reality of sexual orientation as an innate characteristic of a person rather than a preference chosen willfully. This piece mischaracterizes that reality completely in ways that are homophobic. Very strong condemnatory language about sin was common in my sphere and vocabulary then (and for some time afterwards), and I believed the traditional Christian teaching that homosexual behavior is sin. For that reason, this paper will no doubt be offensive to some readers. Although I no longer think or speak of homosexuality in the homophobic terms I used here, there’s no doubt that I did for a long time. This piece is a reflection of that fact about my past. In regards to the piece more broadly, some of the core philosophical thesis still resonates with me. I still believe America suffers the social effects and disruption that come from lack of a shared moral center or objective foundation for shared morality–we have spent decades growing increasingly divided over morality. But I’m no longer certain to what extent such an objective foundation exists or how to find it if it does, and lacking that certainty, I find it harder to be a moral dogmatist on many matters, not only sexuality. In addition, having been thoroughly disillusioned by many right-wing sex scandals since and also more historically informed, I no longer see Bill Clinton as uniquely bad in his behavior or the GOP as ingenuous in its moral outrage. But for the record, I still think he abused his power in immoral ways and that Esquire’s cover photo was an inappropriate, sly celebration of his ‘prowess.’ As a side note, after researching for this paper, one of the dean of men’s staff confronted me about my late-night Internet searches on my work computer that were apparently related to homosexuality in some way. Looking back, amusing, but awkward at the time. (DL, Sept. 18, 2021)

Perversity is acceptable in America; it’s the new freedom. Our honorable President has underscored this sobering reality yet again with his cover appearance on the December issue of Esquire magazine (a glossy purveyor of trendy American hedonism). The photo has been unofficially titled “Monica’s View,” and as incredible as it would have seemed to me two days ago, Clinton has indeed suavely offered his crotch to the American people.

Continue reading →
Standard