In the Centre Daily Times today (after 11/4, link requires subscription), I noticed a central theme that appears in the answers the State College Vision slate of candidates gave to the question: What would your…
Christopher LongNovember 4, 2007
The upcoming School Board election in State College seems to mark an important turning point for our schools. As someone with two young daughters who will enter the district in the next three or four…
Christopher LongOctober 24, 2007
Nat Jackson and David Yanofsky have taken it upon themselves to reactivate the Penn State Atheist, Agnostic Association that was started two years ago by Richard Jeffery, a former philosophy major here at Penn State.…
Christopher LongOctober 3, 2007
I received my new iPod Touch the other day and have had a few days to play with it. On the whole, I would say that it is very close to being one of the…
Christopher LongOctober 1, 2007
There is a leaf in my book bag. I found it when I was standing in front of my class of first-year students, taking out my computer and books, preparing to teach. It brought me…
Christopher LongSeptember 10, 2007
Today is Labor Day and there is short quiet before the storm of debate in Washington about the war in Iraq unleashes itself upon us. General Petraeus will give his assessment later in the month.…
Christopher LongSeptember 3, 2007
Martin Luther King dreamed that one day people would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." If you listen to that speech again, it is difficult…
Christopher LongAugust 29, 2007
This year witnessed the death of Richard Rorty, an important American philosopher and good friend to my own teacher, Richard Bernstein. I embed here a YouTube clip posted by my colleague at Penn State, Phillip…
Christopher LongAugust 24, 2007
In the distance is the sound of drums and horns. The high school band has begun to practice again behind the football field where young men run and tackle, drilling for the new season. The…
Christopher LongAugust 21, 2007
The Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) sponsored its second annual Centre County farm tour today. My family, along with our neighbors, the Erickson's (with whom we share a summer share at the Village Acres…
Christopher LongAugust 11, 2007
Last week I wondered whether Congress would have the courage to pursue the question of impeachment. This week we received the unequivocal answer: no. In fact, not only will the Congress not pursue the national…
Christopher LongAugust 8, 2007
In the Federalist Papers #65, Alexander Hamilton articulates the "true spirit" of the institution of impeachment written into the constitution. Article II, section 4 of the United States Constitution, puts the question of impeachment in…
Christopher LongAugust 1, 2007
AVALON, NJ - This is a place of liminal passages: the pines give way to dunes, the dunes to sea, the sea to the horizon and an openness of possibility. The elements too pass into…
Christopher LongJuly 21, 2007
In the Poetics, Aristotle says: To imitate is co-natural to human-beings from childhood and in this they differ from other animals because they are the most imitative and produce their first acts of understanding by…
Christopher LongJuly 12, 2007
I am beginning to think about the significance of RSS feeds and how they might be used in teaching. Google has a number of tools of potential importance for teaching. For example, the Google Reader…
Christopher LongJuly 3, 2007
In the June 25, 2007 edition of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports on the report General Taguba filed chronicling the "systematic and illegal abuse" of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison and its initial…
Christopher LongJune 25, 2007
Last weekend my family participated in the annual Strawberry festival at the Village Acres Farm, where we are members of their community supported agriculture (CSA) program. As you can see, the strawberries were beautiful, and…
Christopher LongJune 18, 2007
The title of this web log is more than a play on the name of its author. It refers specifically to Socrates' insistence in the Republic (at 435d and 503c-d) that the path to truth,…
Christopher LongJune 10, 2007
