Jonathan Chaplin on the killing of Osama bin Laden

Was the Osama bin Laden killing an act of just war?

To properly judge whether the operation against Bin Laden was simply vigilantism it must be tested against specific criteria

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  Jonathan Chaplin

The ethics of climate change

The ethics of climate change with Stephen Bouma-Prediger

http://player.vimeo.com/video/17847072

Ethics of Climate Change from Calvin College on Vimeo.

Climate chnage expalined cartoon style

Business ethics – David Batstone

Videos from David Batstone here

He covers: Relationships at work, what to do in a soul deadening job? What if I don’t fit in at work? Whistleblowing – should we? and relationships at work.

In praise of slow reading

Ray Pennings points to the Slow Reading Movement mentioned in the Guardian. Slow is the new fast. John Newkirk, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, has some helpful advice to help us slow read:

• Memorizing: Memorization is often called “knowing by heart,” and for good reason. Memorizing enables us to possess a text in a special way.
• Reading Aloud: Reading aloud is a regular activity in elementary classrooms, but it dies too soon. Well-chosen and well-read texts are one of the best advertisements for literacy. By reading aloud, teachers can create a bridge to texts that students might read; they can help reluctant readers imagine a human voice animating the words on the page.
• Attending to Beginnings: Writers often struggle with their beginnings because they are making so many commitments; they are establishing a voice, narrator, and point of view that are right for what will follow. These openings often suggest a conflict. They raise a question, pose a problem, create an “itch to be scratched.” Readers need to be just as deliberate and not rush through these carefully constructed beginnings. As teachers, we can model this slowness.
• Rethinking Time Limits on Reading Tests: We currently give students with disabilities additional time to complete standardized tests; we should extend this opportunity to all students. Tests place too high a premium on speed, and limits are often set for administrative convenience rather than because of a reasoned belief in what makes good readers.
• Annotating a Page: In this activity, students probe the craft of a favorite writer. They pick a page they really like, photocopy it, and tape the photocopy to a larger piece of paper so they have wide margins in which they can make notations. Their job is to give the page a close reading and mark word choices, sentence patterns, images, dialogue—anything they find effective. A variation of this activity is a quote and comment assignment in which students copy out passages by hand that they find particularly meaningful and then comment on why they chose those passages. Copying a passage slows us down and creates an intimacy with the writer’s style—a feel for word choice and for how sentences are formed.
• Reading Poetry: Even in this age of efficiency and consumption, it is unlikely that anyone will reward students for reading a million poems. Poems can’t be checked off that way. They demand a slower pace and usually several readings—and they are usually at their best when read aloud.
• Savoring Passages: Children know something that adults often forget—the deep pleasure of repetition, of rereading, or of having parents reread, until the words seem to be part of them.

Pennings on Colson, Crouch and Hunter

Are we called to change the world? Yes—just as we are called to be holy. We can no more change the world than we can change ourselves. But our inability to change ourselves is not an excuse of unholy living. Neither is our inability to change the world a reason to hide in our privatized bushels. It is precisely because our involvement is faith-inspired that a very different calculus is invoked to measure the results of our activity. When the benchmarks for our success are linking our activities with world-changing consequences, we are almost always on the wrong path.

Ray Pennings ‘Embracing the paradox’ Comment 25 June

How To Write Good

How To Write Good

by Frank L. Visco

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t more use words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

David instone Brewer: What’s the problem with divorce?

Vote for policies

Here’s another useful website that will help you choose who to vote for based on policies and not personalities:

Not sure who to vote for? Try Vote Match 2010

This is designed to help determine which party – based on their manifesto promises – best matches your own views.