The Marks of a Christian Scholar: A Vocational Description (Part Three)[1] Mark Eckel, ThM PhD, Professor of Leadership, Education & Discipleship Capital Seminary & Graduate School, Washington, D.C. By guiding attention we take in our hands the key to the formation and the development of personality and character. -- Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky[2] My first stint as an educator was chosen by a four letter word: time. My training was in pastoral studies. But I was being offered a position as a high … [Read more...] about “Time” to be imitated?
time management
Returning to Graduate School – Thoughts by Michael Stell (2)
Part Two – Being a Graduate Student When I entered grad school, I entered with a sense of purpose that was in my mind akin to the idea that the Puritans had of vocation or calling. Attending a Catholic university, I realize that many use the word vocation in strictly religious ways, but the Puritans viewed all of life as religious, and so all of life should be understood as vocation. I had been involved in the vocation of teaching, but not at the place where I felt I was fulfilling my true calling. I was going to … [Read more...] about Returning to Graduate School – Thoughts by Michael Stell (2)
Expert versus Lay Calendars — Thoughts from “Objects of Time”
A written calendar, then, is not so much as a cognitive tool to assist the reckoning of time, but a cognitive and cultural tool that can either promote social coordination or intersubjective senses of uncanniness, or even both, as in the case of the Jewish calendar. Calendars as artifacts are tools of power and social coordination. There also is an important contrast between complex calendars that require trained experts to interpret them versus simple calendars that almost anyone can use. The former are associated with … [Read more...] about Expert versus Lay Calendars — Thoughts from “Objects of Time”
On the Tenure Track
I went through a painful process last year. Necessary, but painful. But it was a good thing. At my institution, we undergo a pre-tenure evaluation before we go up for tenure —a practice run, so to speak —and my pre-tenure review provided a valuable opportunity for me to reconsider my priorities as a Christian faculty member. As I listed committees I served on, classes I taught, lectures I attended, students I mentored —accounted for how I used my time —I could no longer deceive myself into thinking that I was devoting … [Read more...] about On the Tenure Track
How would you describe your “time consciousness?”
While reading Kevin Birth‘s Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, I wondered if weekends provide an opportunity to tell time differently. There is a danger in viewing the clock as necessary for certain cognitive tasks simply because we use it for those tasks. The importance of clock time in twenty-first-century economic practices cannot be used as grounds for assuming that it was necessary for economic practices in the medieval period. This misconception is key to the view of medieval timekeeping as … [Read more...] about How would you describe your “time consciousness?”