My sister was called over the Christmas holiday to teach early morning seminary in her East Coast ward. When I responded on her personal blog by just saying “Yay!” I got an e-mail telling me I couldn’t get off the hook so easily, since I’ve had experience. :) She asked, without directing any specific questions to me, what advice I would have about teaching seminary. Having done some thinking over the holiday about the question, I’ve decided to put together a post here at Feast detailing eight points about teaching seminary that have been culled from my (ultimately rather limited) experience.

My hope is that the seven points I work through below will encourage others to contribute additional thoughts, that this can be the beginning of a discussion rather than a summary of my thoughts alone. So please feel free—indeed, obliged—to pitch in a few thoughts about teaching seminary, early morning or otherwise.

I should add this last caveat. Everything I say here is obviously my own—deeply held—opinion. I’m quite happy to be disagreed with, but I do believe what I say here quite strongly. Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot that I loved in this chapter. In general, I agree with Ranciere, that emancipation is something that cannot be guaranteed by the establishment of an institution. In fact, I think this is a very useful chapter in terms of thinking about the Apostasy in Mormon theology: in a sense, Christ’s failure to establish a lasting church, in the Old and New worlds, attests to Ranciere’s main point of this chapter.

But where does that leave us in terms of thinking about the Church as an institution, and efforts to establish Zion?

Read the rest of this entry »

From Ben:

[Note: for unknown reasons, the online text jumps from page 75 to page 82, and I have no way of finding out what the missing section is. Thus, I fear we are missing a crucial part of the chapter’s argument. Also, I do not focus on many of the key points in the chapter, only those that especially caught my fancy; please feel free to discuss other key points in the comments.]

I especially enjoyed this chapter, because it is one about application; specifically, how application applies to mindset. After focusing primarily on abstract principles of intelligence and inequality, Ranciere offers a somewhat jolting first sentence to beginning chapter 4: “There is no such thing as a possible society. There is only the society that exist” (75). This is significant for Ranciere’s approach to intelligence, because, as has been repeated many times thus far, it is better to work from a principle than towards it. In a rhetorical tweak of Platonic dualism, European idealism, and Jacotot’s contemporary Romanticism, Ranciere argues for a collapse between the immediate and the vision, the dream and the reality. Read the rest of this entry »

What follows is (1) an interpretive summary/commentary of/on chapter 1 of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, followed by (2) a series of questions I think might be raised in light of the reading and which we might productively engage. Read the rest of this entry »

I want here just to spell out what is hopefully a helpful bit of background material on the work of Jacques Ranciere. For the most part, however, I assume it is just an exercise I’m taking advantage to help me synthesize Ranciere’s various projects, which have received a lot of attention from me lately. :) Read the rest of this entry »