Philosophy Department Newsletter - July 2007 (Vol. 7, Issue 1)

 

Faculty News

 

Norman Wirzba.

This past academic year was like riding a buckin’ bronco. That is an image dear to me as a prairie farm boy from western Canada. It was mostly really good stuff that kept me hopping (and a bit dazed), but a lot. This year I had to juggle teaching, committee work, writing, speaking engagements, and the busy, fascinating life of four kids. If you are ever bored, come to our house where boredom is simply not possible.

My book Living the Sabbath finally appeared with Brazos press in November. It is doing very well, getting good reviews, and being read by a bunch of people. The result is that I am getting a lot of invitations to speak about the Sabbath. This next year I will be talking about its themes in Durham, NC, Montreal, San Francisco, Chicago and Kansas City. I wonder how I will work out Sabbath observance myself. I would hate to put myself in a performative contradiction.

I am continuing to be busy with more writing projects, working on books on agrarianism, Christianity and the environment, and a longer term project on how to understand and honor human needs. A real joy has been to help other people publish their work. I do this as the Series Editor of “Culture of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism” being published by the University Press of Kentucky!

Life at home is exceptionally good these days. We are all thriving I would say. Gretchen Ziegenhals, my wife, continues to direct the Women’s Studies program here at GC while continuing her consulting work with the Lilly Endowment. Emily (almost 16!) is doing a great job in High School, cross country and track, softball, piano, and the band. Anna (almost 14) is finishing Middle School, while playing piano and flute, running cross country and track. Ben (9) is big into books and soccer, and Luke (7) loves soccer, basketball, and flirting with girls. It’s all so very good that I need to remind myself daily not to take it for granted.

Come by for a visit. We would love to see you.

Roger Ward

This last year was an interesting mix of new and old activities. On the new side I taught a philosophy class at Scott County High School – 7:38am! A great learning experience for me and I hope for them. Also on the new side I became the director of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Vocation and also coordinator of Meetinghouse programs. That really means more meetings and reports about the activities to bring an emphasis on vocation in the academic program. So far so good. I attended the usual conferences, the Society of the Advancement of American Philosophy was especially fun because my paper on Peirce’s Logic and the Reason of Things was well received, and I had lunch with alumn Randy Spencer, recently PhD’d from Baylor! I tripped up to South Dakota and gave a lecture at Augustana College with side trips to Northern Baptist Seminary to talk about Edwards and University of Sioux Falls to talk about Kant. And then there was the Peace, Politics and Pragmatism session I organized at the Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Ho hum. The big deal for me, however, was delivering the McCandless lecture at Regent’s Park College. I talked about James and Conversion (I told you it was old) to a great audience including students Jennifer Martin, Kristie Powell, Tyler Stewart, Taylor Raines, Caitlyn Adkins, and alumn Jacob Geisecke. And my parents. My Dad asked the most difficulty question during Q and A: “So, Roger, when do you consider the time of your own conversion?” A serious question with a serious answer, and I think only he could have asked it in that setting. It was a great moment.

 continue to write on Edwards and I have couple publications coming out this next year. There are two edited books in the works from the Young Scholars in the Baptist Academy, and Gina Puthoff is helping me breathe life into my business ethics manuscript. One final new item is a class on Harry Potter and philosophical self-discovery I will teach next Spring. Prepping for that has opened up a view into literature, fantasy and philosophy that will keep me going for awhile.

Brad Hadaway

In July, 2007 my year long sabbatical is quickly drawing to a close. In the last year I maintained my responsibilities related to the Oxford Programs at Georgetown College, but I let all my teaching responsibilities slide into the background. Though I wish I had more FINISHED products to show for my year away from teaching, I have to say that my seven-year sabbatical itch was indeed scratched.

My main project this year has been the writing of a book on the ethics of consumption. With each passing year, my own personal descent into a kind of middle class inferno has produced more and more certainty that the consumptive lives of affluent Americans (myself included, of course) are courting not only environmental disasters and disasters in terms of economic equity, but also disasters related to personal, self-regarding virtue. I believe that our unreflective embrace of consumer culture acts as a kind of moral training in vice. This training has produced souls which lack the kind of self-mastery central to Kantian virtue ethics, and without a stance of resistance against consumer culture, we are increasingly becoming "playthings of the mere passions." Several chapters are ready in draft form, but I have a lot of work to do in the coming months to finish.

The writing has been pleasantly interrupted throughout the year with various trips. I spent a week becoming acquainted with Guatemala in October. Guatemala is an interesting case study for me because it is infected with radical poverty (over 70% of the population is below the poverty line) occasionally juxtaposed with bursts of relative wealth in various areas. During my trip I was shown three story, brand new houses, rising right in the midst of otherwise desperately poor communities. The influx of financial resources to this kind of area will be a long term source of interest, because it will be in that kind of transitional context that the wrapping and grasping tendrils of a freshly planted consumer culture can best be examined. I hope that this trip was the first of many to come.

I have also taken trips to various conferences this year. I presented a paper entitled "Kant, Consumption, and Modernity" at the "Yearning for the Infinite Conference" at Notre Dame. The Lilly Fellows Network Program National Conference was also on the agenda.

One of the absolute highlights of the past year was an extended trip to Oxford. For six weeks, I wrote, completed research on the Oxford tutorial method, and walked the city of dreaming spires. My family joined me for the final three weeks, and while the mornings were still devoted to my writing tasks, the afternoons were gloriously lost to drives in the Cotswolds, meanderings in the Oxford colleges, and day trips to London and the continent. Though there were some setbacks along the way (I got my first traffic ticket ever from a cursed British traffic camera), the main project for Jodi, the kids, and me over the next year will be to find ways to reproduce a little of the shift in pace and shrinking of commitments that we found so readily in Oxford. We owe many thanks to Regent's Park College in the University of Oxford for being such fine hosts during our wonderful and restful stay.

 

Philosophy Shorts

• We were happy to host this year a lecture on global warming by Dr. David W. Orr. Dr. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College. He is also a James Marsh, Professor at large at the University of Vermont.
• Georgetown also hosted Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University. He gave an excellent talk on pacifism during the fall semester.
• One final talk was delivered by Matt Dickerson, a professor in environmental studies at Middlebury College on the environmental vision of C. S. Lewis. All in all, a very stimulating academic year.
• Would you like to sponsor an award, underwrite a speaker, or give some other support to the philosophy department at Georgetown? If so, please contact us, and we'll be happy to share ways that you can honor your philosophical education.

 

Department News

This year will go down in our memory as one of the very best because rarely do we have so many good students all at one time. Not only did we graduate an exceptional bunch of majors, we still have more to go. Our students in philosophy continue to be campus leaders, both in a formal and informal sense. They add spice to student conversations, college governance, and The Georgetownian newspaper. We are proud of them all, and delighted to teach them.

This year saw us graduate several majors. Here is what they are planning to do next: Zachary Bay is going to McAfee School of Theology in Georgia to pursue and M.Div. degree; Tyler Birdwhistell has enrolled in Georgetown College’s M.A. program in education; Adam Glover is going to complete the M.A. in Latin American Studies at the University of Kentucky, and then reapply to some Ph.D. programs in philosophy; Shea James is going to attend Drew University’s School of Theology to complete the M.Div. degree; Patrick Messer is taking the year off to work and take care of his home before he heads off to Duke Divinity School next year to pursue the M.Div. degree; Jon Myers, when not writing music, is planning to attend medical school; Amanda White is taking the year off to work while she plans on graduate school programs in justice and women’s issues. A pretty impressive bunch, wouldn’t you say.

This year on Award’s Day we gave out the following awards: Outstanding Major went to Adam Glover; the Heizer Book Award was shared by Zachary Bailes and Sean Schweickhardt; the Joseph-Beth Award went to Amanda White; and the Best Performance by an Underclassman/woman went to Elaina Reid.

We want to congratulate all our students in philosophy this year. They are an exceptional bunch, and we are very proud of them.

 

Graduate News

This is not to say that previous classes of majors are slouches. Jarrod Lopez (’06) has been admitted to Yale Divinity School’s M.A.R. program in Philosophical Theology.

Carolyn Schnurr (’06) has gotten a wonderful fellowship to study law for one semester in Ireland (as part of her program at the University of Maine School of Law.

Josh Hearne was recently ordained to the Christian ministry, and he continues to work towards his MDiv at Duke Divinity.

If you have graduated and have some good news to share, we would love to hear it.

Remember, continue to do good work and stay in touch!