Things Are Getting Better All the Time

American Literati & Colleagues Across
the Curriculum (Courses w/o Borders)

Dear American Literati,

You people are much older than I am.
More advanced. Technologically
more savvy. You inhabit a different
universe than what I live in. Smarter
over all.

Have you heard of the Generation Gap?
A term coined in the 60’s when I was
typing my dissertation on a portable
Royal—using wite-out (invented by
one of the mothers of The Monkeys)
to erase my many mistakes: The
Domestic Myth: Hawhorne's
Houses & Home Sweet Home.

I remain a youth of the 50’s, imprinted
just prior to TV and aerials on roofs
across the country: unlettered in your
Neo-Oral, Post-Literate Age.

Those were end-times too: world going
to hell in a hand basket. Atom bombs
and everyone smoking cigarettes.

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for
an instructor as youth, for it has not profited
so much as it has lost.... Practically, the old
have no very important advice to give the young,
their own experience has been so partial, and their
lives have been such miserable failures.” Thoreau.

I believe this to be true
The opposite is also true. .
How to do justice to both truths without
diminishing either: that’s the liberal art.
(aka: dialectic.)

My courses are all the same: campfires with no smores.
Swapping lies & ghost stories. Information’s no longer
a problem. Everyone’s a laptop dancer and can google
up the intelligence of the universe in seconds & send
a link to Santa Cruz while sitting in French class.

And so: you tell me: what’s good
to do in the classroom these days?

I say, IT’s not what we know but whether we
put it in play that counts. Compose & Be Composed.
School and Be Schooled. Play and Be Played.

IT’s not like it was in the olden days.
(IT, I said. Do I have to spell IT out?)

But walk up and down the halls of higher
education and look in the rooms. You’d
think it was 1955. Need we argue?

(Take this down.
It’ll be on the final examination.)

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

As a specially crafted awakening sermon,
Sinners was aimed at a particularly hard-
hearted congregation. But, at the same
time, the awakening sermon and all it
expressed—the awful weight of sin, the
wrath of an infinitely holy God, and the
unexpectedness of the moment when
God will execute justice—were integral
to Edwards’s theology. This sermon, therefore,
deserves to be studied and meditated on for its
own sake, but also as part of a larger vision
of the spiritual life.