Author: nfriend

Nathan Friend has a PhD in American Studies and teaches history and philosophy. He and his wife (Sarah Gerhart Friend), with their three daughters and baby boy, are parishioners at Saint Paul's Antiochian Orthodox Church in Emmaus, PA.

Live Not By Lies…but which ones? [Book Review]

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As the title of this review intimates, I liked Rod Dreher’s new book Live Not By Lies (2020), but I believe there are some blind spots in it.  Overall, I appreciated the second part of the book more than the first half.  And having read all of his books, I think I’m in a pretty good position to understand his oeuvre and general authorial strengths and weaknesses.   First, the positive. Dreher is a fantastic storyteller. He has a uniquely powerful ability to weave his own emotions into a narrative to punch it up to a new level. …

How Shall We Teach?

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Dillon, one of my students from this fall semester, took an upper division course on the history of modernity in Europe.  It was a survey class from the beginning of the seventeenth century through World War I.  In the course of the semester, I found him to be a politically engaged young man, who supported Black Lives Matter and urged me to listen to songs from Catch 22’s album Permanent Revolution.  I was willing to oblige, and we had several interesting discussions by email and face to face.  He is an individual genuinely interested in ideas…