Although I am not a complete Luddite (I text more than call nowadays!) I still use a paper calendar.  I save them year to year, and the one for 2008-09 will be one of the more cherished.  Coffee rings and multiple staples hold together the pages that record the hiring of our two newest department members, Jonathan Sands-Wise and Michael Tilley, the deadline for my application for promotion to full professor (mission accomplished!), and my daughter Rachel’s first year as a Georgetown student.   It also shows the meeting schedule for department chairs since I have taken over that job after Norman, and multiple events related to General Education Curriculum Revision that owes its success in large part to Brad’s extraordinary work and leadership with the faculty.  The Meetinghouse Council and the Faculty Center for Teaching and Vocation that I direct account for most of the other meetings and events noted in my hard to decipher abbreviations.  And the names of students for independent studies, tutorials and other meetings are sprinkled in with associated texts of Leibniz, Nietzsche, Peirce, Paz, and Plato.

We have had some excellent people visit our campus this year. David Bradshaw from UK, David Williams from Wisconsin, and Bruce Main from UrbanPromise as the Danford Thomas lecturer are a few of the highlights.  There are deadlines for articles and book reviews circled and starred, but I didn’t write down the day the books with my chapters on Edwards and Peirce arrived.  I should have. Travel times are recorded for the Baptist Association of Philosophy Teachers in APA Central where I organized a session for SAAP, the visit to Texas A&M for the SAAP meeting and John McDermott fest, and the Spring break week in Camden NJ with 10 GC students.  It was a very busy Spring semester, and I was very glad to make it through the Senior oral exams and graduation exercises to the summer!  There is more open space now, since the Young Scholars in the Baptist Academy is planned and ready to go, and family vacation time has arrived.  If you see a lone cyclist on highway 62 between Georgetown and Eddyville, that may be me, so please give me a wide berth and a wave.

As noted in prior newsletters, my time recently has been largely devoted to curriculum reform, and I have some good news to report!  For the first time in 30 or more years, Georgetown College will have a new general education curriculum beginning in the 2010-11 school year.  The faculty has worked very hard to craft a plan which they believe will allow each student who wanders through the halls of Pawling and Asher, Anderson and Cooke, to come away armed with the tools to shape their own identities and communities in ever more constructive ways.  It’s been a long project in the development phase (four years!), and though our implementation work will involve a good bit more effort over the next couple of years, it’s been exciting to see the work so many people have invested to make an already excellent Georgetown education even better inch closer to a finishing mark.

I’m wrapping up my ninth year at Georgetown, and I’m still having a great time working with our students.  Last year’s freshman class was simply outstanding, and I particularly have enjoyed getting to know the first batch of Oxford Honors Scholars.  They may read this entry, so I won’t brag too much (we don’t want to build any self-importance now do we?), but they rose to meet the challenges set before them and they really seem to care about making the most of their studies.  I know we’ll hear big things from them.  In addition, the group we sent to Oxford this year was the biggest ever, and all our students continue to earn high praise from their Oxford tutors for ability and effort.  Finally, my philosophy students this year have done a thorough job of convincing me that our discipline is alive and kicking!  My ethics of consumption class last fall did excellent work and helped me fine tune and evaluate several of the ideas that are slowly making their way into the book that shares the name with the course title.

I continue to write about Kantian virtue and its particular relationship to consumption issues.  I presented a paper entitled “Kantian Temperance” at a Conference on the Cardinal Virtues at Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI.  My book on the ethics of consumption, though placed on the back burner during curriculum reform, is still taking shape.  I’ve quit making predictions about when it’ll be finished, but I’m hoping it’ll be before the economic downturn progresses to such depths that it makes the subject matter irrelevant.

On the home front, our family moved into a new house (speaking of consumption!) about a block off campus.  We were sorry to leave our beloved ranch house in Indian Hills, but the move was occasioned by the realization that one day our children might actually want their own rooms and by the fact that I might actually move my sedentary self around a bit if I lived that close to campus.  The last part has definitely come true.  My car has been driven about three times since we moved in January.  The house is 75 years old, and it was built by Dr. Charles Hatfield, a former mathematician at Georgetown College.  Any 75 year old house will have its challenges, but we have truly loved filling out our new space and finding a new way of living in our new (old) home.

I hope that all who have some investment in our department are doing well, and I encourage you to drop us a note or stop in to tell us how things are going for you!

As a first-year professor at Georgetown College, much of my first few months were spent getting into the groove of constant preparation for class and grading of class materials, but I was also working on finishing and editing my dissertation.  Needless to say, the combination kept me sufficiently busy during the fall semester, but I greatly enjoyed teaching and appreciated the caliber of students that I was blessed to teach.

During the fall semester, I taught three sections of an Introduction to Ethics and one section of History of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, a generous schedule with only two preps so that I could complete my dissertation as well.  Over Christmas break I successfully defended my dissertation, which explored and defended the thesis that virtue is necessary for happiness by looking in detail at the ethical works of Aristotle and Joseph Butler, a famous Anglican Bishop in the 18^th century that is now little studied, as well as some contemporary moral philosophers, such as Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre.  Having completed my graduate work, I took on the normal load of three preps during the spring semester, teaching two sections of Ethics, one of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, and one section of Basic Philosophy.  I officially graduated on May 16^th from Baylor University.

I also had the privilege to present a couple of papers at professional conferences this year, including one on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre at the International MacIntyre Conference at St. Meinrad’s in Indiana last August, and a paper on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on justice at the pacific division of the American Philosophical Association in April.  Both were well received, and the conferences represented an enjoyable chance for fellowship and philosophical conversation.  I hope to work up some more conference presentations this coming year, and am also working on several articles for publication.

The philosophy department at Georgetown has been extremely welcoming, and my wife and I are very happy to have landed in such a great Christian community with wonderful students and meaningful academic and personal support.