As I wrote in an earlier post, this year I’m participating in Marci Glass’s STARward project, in which participants reflect on a word given to them by Marci. As luck would have it, I drew the word calling. “Calling” would be a good word for me in any year, but it’s especially apt for this year. [...]
[Continue reading...]Hey, look over there
February 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment
I have a piece up at The Blue Review on Wikipedia, Ancestry.com, and the gendering of digital public history. Here’s an excerpt: Engendering Online History Wikipedia vs. Ancestry.com: Historianship at a crossroads Businessweek reports that “genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online.” It’s no wonder, then, that Ancestry.com, which for a monthly [...]
[Continue reading...]The dark heart
February 24, 2013 By 2 Comments
I promised a series of posts on gun violence, and so far I’ve only written two: one on the intersection of guns and whiteness and another on Christian responses to the Sandy Hook massacre. There will likely be more posts coming, as I’m still reading pretty extensively on gun ownership and gun violence in the [...]
[Continue reading...]Busy busy
February 21, 2013 By 2 Comments
Intellectual and vocational theme of the semester: Charismatic megafauna, literal and metaphorical I haven’t been writing much here, but I’ve been writing elsewhere, and I hope to soon have a few links to share to pieces in a couple of bloggish venues, as well as to a journal article. So. . . how about an [...]
[Continue reading...]A small Wikipedia discovery
January 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment
I’ve spent much of the past several days working on my piece on Ancestry.com and Wikipedia.org. (Many thanks to those of you who commented on my last post.) I’ve been asked to target that article to an Idaho audience, which means I find myself searching Wikipedia and Ancestry for topics related to Idaho history. Although [...]
[Continue reading...]First thoughts: Wikipedia and Ancestry.com
January 7, 2013 By 16 Comments
Since I had to take Lucas to school anyway this morning, I decided to stop by the office for some focused time, pneumonia be damned. Unfortunately, 90 minutes into my productive e-mail session, Fang texted to warn me about the newly falling snow and to suggest I get on the roads sooner rather than later. [...]
[Continue reading...]Round 3
January 5, 2013 By 1 Comment
Today I was prescribed a third round of antibiotics for pneumonia. Anyone want to place bets on how functional I’ll be when classes begin on January 22? Or when I need to get back to working on some key collaborations on Monday? Meanwhile, I’m still crossing plenty of items off my sedentary to-do list, and [...]
[Continue reading...]The gods of gun violence
January 3, 2013 By 4 Comments
It’s no secret that when it comes to religion, I’m a skeptic. That said, I’m not a belligerent atheist; I’m a listener, not a combatant. In fact, several believers have been surprised by my atheism and remarked that despite my lack of Christian faith, I have “a deep soul.” Most recently, a fundamentalist Christian student [...]
[Continue reading...]And things just keep getting better
January 3, 2013 By 2 Comments
As if antibiotic-resistant pneumonia for me and a nasty chest cold for Fang weren’t enough, the household gods decided to toss in another challenge. Here’s Lucas’s op-ed from New Year’s Day:
[Continue reading...]An appreciation
January 2, 2013 By 1 Comment
I have to admit, when Fang said we should sign the boy up for Taekwondo, I was a skeptic. My pacifism runs deep, and I was worried Taekwondo involved a lot of fighting. We had already talked at length about how Lucas was going to be a big kid, and if he happened to inherit [...]
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