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No one lies about what happened to their homework anymore. We don't tell teachers that the dog ate it, or that aliens stole it. Instead, contemporary excuses are of two sorts. The nativist excuse suggests that there is some innate deficiency in the student that determines that she is unable to achieve success in some discipline. For example, upon receiving a terrible grade on her math test, a student may remark, "I'm just not a math person." According to the nativist, one's success or failure is determined by an innate ability (or inability) to succeed in a given domain of learning. The excuse implies that failure on a test is no more the fault of the student than it is the fault of a car that it cannot laugh. In contrast, the environment excuse does not presuppose a student's innate ability. Instead the student claims that she is unable to achieve a task due to a deficient environment. "The house was too noisy," "some friends came ...

Pre-mods generally thought of human beings as a kind. Humans have a nature; they are 'rational beasts' or embodied souls. Mods were not so concerned with human nature; they were more concerned with what we could know and how we could know it. According to mods, we are thinking things or blank slates. In the twilight years of the Enlightenment, Hume cast doubt on whether there was such a thing as human nature. Aren't we all just a bundle of experiences? The first generation of post-mods agreed with his conclusion and suggested that we are all social/linguistic constructs at best. The most recent generation of post-mods found such skepticism dull. Consequently, they sought to mix some pre-mod in with their view. According to the new post-mod, we have natures but they are not species wide. There is no human kind. At least, if there is such a thing, it is irrelevant. In its place, there only kinds of humans , humans with innate identities known through introspection or ob...

"Sincerity and reality... don't make it the better. That which is real and hearty is often called sincere; whether it be in virtue or vice. Some persons are sincerely bad; others are sincerely good... But a being sincere, hearty and in good earnest, is no virtue, unless it be in a thing that is virtuous. A man may be sincere and hearty in joining a crew of pirates, or a gang of robbers. When the devils cried out, and besought Christ not to torment them, it was no mere pretense; they were very hearty in their desires not to be tormented: but this did not make their will or desires virtuous" (Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will ).

This was Politico's attempt to explain one man's evil deed: "He fell victim to an increasingly common, sometimes overwhelming, temptation that the online world offers up to exhibitionists." When in doubt, Politico informs us, blame the internet and some kind of personal identity. The identity in question is 'exhibitionist'; that's just what he is. It's not something he does that is wrong, but an immutable part of his personal identity. And if you give someone who has that kind of identity a twitter account, then the inevitable follows and who can blame him? If anything is to blame it is the 'online world', a kind of playground for his type. What was the man to do? Politico's Conclusion: We are all victims: victims of genes and environments. Well the 'victim' should fight back. He should tell Politico that they are wrong, gravely mistaken in fact. Tell 'em that the next time there is a shoot up at the ok-street-corn...

Christian education, despite growing in the United States, continues to struggle to find its place among the largely secular educational environment. Lanney Mayer suggests that Western education provides an inhospitable home for theology under the "hegemony of naturalistic disciplines." Religious education has either moved to the margins or evolved to suit empirical studies.

The selfie reigns. We now take more pictures of ourselves than anything else, even family. Narcissus would have found his home in our culture of vanity. And it's not merely self-love that drives the like-score-card mentality, it is self- construction . At least Narcissus may have had a more static notions of human identity that we do. Our culture abandoned the idea of human nature in favor of a void, an identity determined by choice or cultural construction. And both notions are at play in the selfie.

In a book that has done the rounds, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism,  James K Smith critiques evangelicals for their unfair dismissal of postmodern thought. He takes the three most common "bumper sticker" lines from three of postmodernism's most influential thinkers, tells us what they really mean and why their contributions are helpful for an "emerging postmodern form of church."

Apparently, a problem evangelical Christians have is that we just don't get postmodern people. We plain miss their point. According to Morgan Guyton ( here ) we aren't ironic enough, we crave a 1950's plasticated lifestyle and use the Bible as a political weapon to force a social agenda on people. Apparently there is no other option - either be committed to postmodernism or find oneself in an "enclave" of "Pleasantville."

Postmodernism denies any uniting story into which human stories fit. Postmoderns are lost and trapped at the same time. Devoid of arc, of any narrative theme to attach to, their stories are lost. And without destination the stories are trapped with nowhere to go. Consequently Postmoderns deny the concept of being lost because being lost would suggest that there is somewhere one is supposed to be and that is denied. In place of location and destination, life must be lived ironically. Seriousness must be done away with. The ironic solution to lostness is to live as if nothing matters, as if you are already dead. In postmodern thought nihilism is never fully eradicated. It lurks, ready to pounce, at any opportunity. Behind postmodernism is nihilism, claws at the ready.