On the Road Again

Dear Readers,

As you know the blog the past month or so has been rather slow. This has been for a number of reasons.

First I judged it to be best to skip out on blogging during Lent. It freed up some time to spend with my family and gave me a bit of perspective. Sometimes you need to get away from something to see it more clearly.

Second, I have a paper forthcoming for publication and another one under review which along with my teaching duties has consumed a fair amount of my time. 

Third, I have been embroiled in an academic fracas since another person that I thought was a friend of mine, and a professing Christian, (I suppose thankfully that they aren’t Orthodox) turned out to be plagiarizing my most important work. For academic and legal reasons I am not able to write about this openly. But a word to the wise, if you are in academia, I wouldn’t share any of your best (or original) ideas in seminar with anyone. In my opinion, unless it is in print, formally published and unless there is verbatium copying, you simply can’t win, no matter how overwhelming the evidence. It doesn’t matter what a given policy states in terms of class presentations, colloquia or whatever. If it isn’t in print, you’ve lost. As I have learned this is the unspoken “gnosis” among academics. Silly me, I thought integrity mattered. The will to power crops up in the oddest of places. (See Time Bandits)

Consequently, I won’t be airing some of the cutting edge stuff or things I am kicking around, here anymore or any of my papers even though I have a copyright listed at the header of the blog. It just isn’t sufficient protection against intellectual theft. So until material is accepted for publication, I need to be silent as a trappist church mouse.

So as soon as finals are over and the grading is done, (after the 15th) watch for some new posts on various topics. These will include a second part on metaethics, the inadequacy of Catholicism and Protestantism replies to the problem of evil, and the eternity of the world. I also plan to address some comments I left standing. And a number of you have made email inquiries that I haven’t been able to get back to, so please be patient.

Who’s Your Daddy?

Ok, so this is shameless and corny but the award for best religion blog is up for graps at http://www.bloggerschoiceawards.com/

 We’re listed so please consider voting for us.

A Great Website

I found the articles on Dr. David Bradshaw’s homepage to be quite enlightening, and I thought that I would bring them to the attention of the readers of this blog:

http://www.uky.edu/~dbradsh/

Steven Todd Kaster