By: Kally Elliott on March 14, 2024
“Mrs. Elliott?” the assistant handed me a memo. “Yes,” I replied. “Mr. Hamlin would like to see you in his office after school today,” “Do you know what this is about?” I asked. “No, except I did hear him say something about how you were teaching the kids to say “Brothers and sisters” rather than…
By: Scott Dickie on March 14, 2024
Hmmm…what to do with Pragya Agarwal’s Sway: Unraveling Unconscious Bias? (1) At the risk of going in the categoric opposite direction that Jason recommended in our last cohort zoom gathering (that is, find one point and go deep), I am going to try and articulate why I find myself torn in several directions with this…
By: Todd E Henley on March 13, 2024
Two months ago, we sold our washer and dryer online and I watched as the customer backed into our driveway. When he stopped, I walked outside to greet him. I waved hello and the first words out of his mouth were, “Do you live here?” Honestly, I thought that was a foolish question. After a…
By: Pam Lau on March 13, 2024
“The man’s words to me are not offered but flung: ‘So, what are you? I mean, where are you from?’ I say, ‘New York.’ ‘But your name is Carlos–where are you really from? ‘I say, ‘New York.’ ‘Bueno, yo soy Latino-mi padre es Colombiano, Mi madre es Estadounidense, nació en New York City, I lived in 4…
By: Jenny Dooley on March 13, 2024
Reading Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias by Dr. Pragya Agarwal, is a reflective process. It’s uncomfortable discussing bias due to my intersecting identities as a Caucasian American woman. I’m feeling awkward acknowledging the unconscious bias I experience as a female and as a former expatriate, while simultaneously feeling regretful of my unintentional biases. I’m painfully aware…
By: Tim Clark on March 11, 2024
There’s a person I get to occasionally do work with who thinks that they are right about almost everything. This otherwise smart, reasonable, capable, and pleasant to be with human being simply can’t back down when their perspective is being challenged. As I’ve considered the reason this may be the case, I believe it’s a…
By: Kim Sanford on March 11, 2024
Three days ago, I picked up Sway by Pragya Agarwal.[1] I began reading, and by page 35 I knew what I wanted to write my blog post about. Because I want to keep you in suspense, I’ll come to that in a minute. After the first chapter, I intended to continue with an inspectional read,…
By: Jennifer Vernam on March 11, 2024
In Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias,[1] Pragya Agarwal paints a picture for us of how we are programed to make judgments about others based on how we have been conditioned within our own context.[2] Agarwal asserts that we all have these biases. No one is immune.[3] Much as we learned in RARE leadership,[4] Agarwal encourages that…
By: John Fehlen on March 11, 2024
I came into this blog post knowing that I wanted to title it: “Red and Yellow, Black and White.” If you grew up in the church, or for that matter, didn’t have your head buried in the sand for the entirety of your human existence, you would have [most likely] heard, or at least heard…
By: Travis Vaughn on March 11, 2024
In Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, Pragya Agarwal wants readers to recognize the urgency of understanding implicit/unconscious bias.[1] Using “‘implicit bias’ and ‘unconscious bias’ interchangeably,”[2] Agarwal defines the terms as “biases that exist without our conscious knowledge, the ones that manifest themselves in our actions and reactions often without us realising it, rearing their heads when…
By: Mathieu Yuill on March 10, 2024
The concepts outlined in Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault[1], are new to me. In my formal studies and independent reading I hadn’t explored ideas our postmodernism, modernism, the enlightenment era and the like. In fact, the closest I had ever gotten to it was through playing the…
By: Dinka Utomo on March 8, 2024
“Where the human knowledge ends, God’s wisdom and power begins to manifest in abundance.” –Gift Gugu Mona- Humans generally like certain things. That’s why most people always try to find certainty in their lives because certainty will bring peace to their hearts. A phrase in Latin reads, “certum est quod certum reddi potest,” which…
By: Esther Edwards on March 8, 2024
“We need and desperately want to make sense of our world: to compose/dwell in some conviction of what is ultimately true.”[1] But what is ultimately true? Can we really know? These questions, steeped in skepticism, form the basis of postmodern thinking. It seems to have set the societal tone in how life, truth, and faith…
By: Jana Dluehosh on March 7, 2024
Bothersome, that is how I found this book and my trying to understand. I do not believe I would’ve ever been a philosophy major….it hurts my head. My thoughts on Steven Hicks book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault; I get it, or I think I get it, we are going down…
By: Todd E Henley on March 7, 2024
This week as I read, Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks, I kept thinking about the brain and our emotions. Please bare with me as I discuss how our brain, emotions, and immune system are connected by God and how this goes entirely against most of what postmodernism postulates. Anterior Midcingulate Cortex (aMCC) There’s a brain…
By: Adam Harris on March 7, 2024
I have a bittersweet relationship with philosophy. I think it is incredibly useful to not only examine knowledge, but it exposes the invisible assumptions we have when making claims about truth and points out the tinted glasses sitting on our noses when interpreting data and our experiences. Nancey Murphy, a philosopher from Fuller Theological Seminary…
By: Cathy Glei on March 7, 2024
“To the extent that reason is the standard, faith loses, To the extent that reason develops, science develops, To the extent that science develops, supernaturalistic religious answers to be accepted on faith will be replaced with naturalistic scientific explanations that are rationally compelling.” [1] Supernaturalistic religious responses in faith are the buzz. In conversations with church…
By: Jonita Fair-Payton on March 7, 2024
My Limited Understanding I would like to claim that my understanding of Postmodernism expanded after reading Explaining Postmodernism and listening to The Jordon B. Peterson Podcast with Stephen R. C. Hicks but that would not be true. I did not truly understand the concept of Postmodernism and I am not really sure if that’s…
By: Jenny Dooley on March 7, 2024
After reading, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, by Stephen R. C. Hicks, I find this post more challenging to write than usual. I’m tossing around a number of thoughts struggling to find the right words. Thanks to Chapter 5: The Crisis of Socialism, I keep getting tripped up by my experiences…
By: Jennifer Vernam on March 6, 2024
Goodreads describes Explaining Postmodernism as an “intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy.”[1] Its author, Stephen Hicks, takes us on another step of our journey in understanding the current context in which we find ourselves. Themes from…
