The Foxy Essayist

What do you do when the world around you stops making sense? This is a question everyone faces at times and we each struggle through it in a variety of ways. From a brief moment of confusion to an enduring existential crisis, encountering disturbing experiences in the world is a part of the human experience. How one handles such moments of disorientation determines the form of the individual's growth, either channeling it in a direction that can assimilate the new experiences, or in a way that suppresses them. As a teacher, creating such moments of disorientation is an essential part of what I do. It is hard to learn when you think you know where everything is going. It is also hard to learn when you don't care about what is happening in front of you. Nothing breaks through apathy like a shocking example that does not fit one's assumptions about the world. A classroom crisis of this sort is usually operating on the margins of one's identity. For example, while tea...

In 2014, the film God's Not Dead came out to moderate fanfare. In it, a Christian college student named Josh (Shane Harper) takes a philosophy class from a professor (Mr. Radisson, played by Kevin Sorbo), whose goal for the semester is to convince his students that there is no God. The movie culminates in a debate over the existence of God between Josh and Radisson. Josh wins the debate and convinces his class that God exists, and the movie ends with a Christian rock concert.   In and of itself, there is little original to it. It was made by veteran Christian film maker David A.R. White, and the plot is similar to that of the first film that he produced, End of the Harvest (1998). Such stories exist in various forms and have for decades as folk legends in American religious communities. Since then God's Not Dead has generated two sequels. God's Not Dead 2 , flips the script: a Christian history teacher (played by Melissa Joan Hart) in a public school is threatened with...