We will have the first Wednesday Night Discussion group this Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. We’ll discuss the article Votes of No Confidence by Jedediah Purdy.
Four questions for debate 1:
- Is the death penalty racist?
- Is the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment?
- Does the death penalty deter crime?
- Does justice for victims demand the death penalty?
Resources
August is the time for travel, this year to Iceland, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. If you want to follow the trip, I’ll probably do some posting on my travel blog and will almost certainly post some pictures.
I hope you all enjoy the rest of your summer!
This post will have all the topics for the 2016 Summer Discussion Group. During the summer, let’s meet at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday at Scenic Brew unless otherwise noted. If you have ideas for topics, please feel free to send them my way.
- June 8, 2016: The Canon Is Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, and Totally Gross. Yes, You Have to Read It Anyway by Katy Waldman
- June 15, 2016: No Meeting. The mountains are calling, and I must go.
- June 22, 2016: The War on Stupid People by David Freedman
- June 29, 2016: No meeting.
- Thursday, July 7, 2016: The Deadly Cost of America’s Anti-Cop Ideology by Heather MacDonald
- July 13, 2016: No Discussion this week.
- July 20, 2016: Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture? by Christine Gross-Loh
- July 27, 2016: More Equal than Others by Julian Baggini
Thanks for letting me share the classroom with you all for a semester. In the midst of the hectoring about essays, rants about “the most beautiful sentence ever written,” and criticism of the system, you all found at least a few moments of knowledge or wisdom that will last beyond this semester.
I’ll close this year as I often do with a quote from Walt Whitman, who offers even better life advice than Oprah:
This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
Here are the notes on some of the major authors from the environmental authors we studied in the Wilderness Unit:
