Joe Carter

[Note: In honor of the eighth season of one of my favorite middlebrow reality TV shows, I thought I’d dust off this post from July 2009.} No one thought it would succeed. Even the executive producer doubted that an “American Idol-style competition for dancers” would work on television. Dance . . . . Continue Reading »

The ” I Am Second ” project has some powerful, inspiring testimonies of what happens when you put God first. Here are a few examples: Brian Welch, former guitarist for the rock band Korn Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas Chris Plekenpol, Army Captain and Iraq veteran View more . . . . Continue Reading »

In the recent presidential debate, Rep. Ron Paul stated his position on marriage: [G]et the government out of it. Why doesn’t it go to the church? And why doesn’t it to go to the individuals? I don’t think government should give us a license to get married. It should be in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Although I had no intention of becoming a “Future Farmer of America,” I spent my first two years of high school taking courses in vocational agriculture (it’s just what we do in Texas). During the winter months we’d forgo the usual sheep shearing and hog castrating to work on projects more typically found in a shop class. While we were allowed free reign to rebuild truck motors or craft wooden benches, I mostly spent my time in the corner dreaming nerdy dreams… . Continue Reading »

What is the key to improving education in America? Stuart Buck says that Barker Bausell’s book, Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change , provides the answer: His main thesis: that the only thing that improves education is spending more time on instruction at a given child’s . . . . Continue Reading »

In a recent edition of Literary Review , University of Liverpool professor Philip Davis describes his collaborations with neuroscientists in the study of how Shakespeare’s syntax affects our brains: Abbott (1838-1926) was one of the great Victorian schoolmasters, who wrote, at the age of . . . . Continue Reading »

Tobin Grant reports on the politics of being a “good Christian” : Political scientists often refer to a “God Gap” in American politics, noting the tendency for religious people to be more conservative and vote Republican while those who are less observant lean left and . . . . Continue Reading »

From Russell Moore’s book Tempted and Tried : In our time pornography has become the destroying angel of male Eros. I don’t mean to suggest that pornography is only a male temptation (it is not), but pornography, because of the way a man has been designed toward arousal is, when . . . . Continue Reading »

For almost twenty years Ken Burns’ The Civil War has been one of the ” cultural vegetables ” that have never made it onto my plate. I missed the original when it aired on PBS and never found time to watch it when it came out on DVD. Now it sits in my Netflix “Watch . . . . Continue Reading »

William F. Gavin on a recent ” dramatization of an ideological act of faith “: There I was, watching yet another Law and Order re-run on TNT. In this episode a scientist claimed to have discovered a gene for homosexuality. During the second half of the show, the district attorneys had . . . . Continue Reading »