Delivering the Good Thesis

This is my Tenth year of teaching, and I've read a lot of thesis papers and tried to teach students how to write them. So this is my moment of frustrated clarity on what a good thesis paper should look like. The thesis must be stated in the introduction, argued and defended in the body, and restated and reviewed in the conclusion.

A proper thesis paper must rehearse a controversy or disputed issue, take a position, and state it as the thesis. This all happens in the introductory paragraph and should hit the supporting arguments like a preview for an action movie. Grab the reader by the throat, strap on his seatbelt, slap his bare cheeks with aftershave, cast a spell, I don't care, but get us into the heat of the controversy immediately. Nobody wants to go around the block before they cross the street or on a journey of knowledge Captain Quidnunc.

The thesis paper must distinguish primary and secondary sources!

The thesis must be argue against at least one opposing position in the secondary literature. It must show support from primary sources and interpretations from expert scholars in the secondary sources. This is to say that the thesis must engage the scholarly world and not be written in a hermetically sealed universe of its own pretense. This prevents the paper from sounding like an encyclopedia article, report, or, worst of all, a personal reflection.

A professor friend of mine told me recently that "Jesus does not make good cameos." I laughed my head off! I don't know how many times I've been reading a well intentioned student who inserts his Christian point of view, saying we all know that a certain philosophy is wrong because the Bible says so, and Jesus will prove it when he returns, and I will have won the argument. This comes across as hubris to those who are on the outside looking in, and is usually an unwarranted appeal to authority. If the philosophy is wrong, then Jesus has probably left evidence and arguments in his world to prove it wrong, so that we don't have to invoke his name like it's a heavenly sledgehammer.

We don't always need to argue from a Christian point of view. Sometimes we argue merely from the nature of the research to a conclusion that any human being can understand. If it is done well, it will be compatible with the Christian worldview, and we won't have to get preachy. If we are arguing from an explicitly Christian point of view, then all we need to do is write: "From a Christian point of view ...."

A thesis paper must also restate the thesis in the conclusion and remind the reader of the points scored like the sports reel on ESPN. The introduction is the movie preview and the conclusion is the highlight reel and the body links the two by "delivering the goods."

Whose Freedom?

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

McPherson is excellent at capturing the drama of the war, the execution of the general's strategies, the personalities that animate the history, as well as the political and moral issues at stake. It is truly a tour de force.

His basic theses is that both sides were crying freedom. The South wanted freedom from Northern tyranny, but they were also fighting to maintain slavery. The North sought to preserve the union and the abolitionist cause came increasingly to the fore as Lincoln's views progressed. The slaves cry for freedom was the most profound.

View all my reviews >>

Twentieth Century Europe

Twentieth-Century Europe: A Brief History by Michael D. Richards

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A concise, well written overview of Twentieth Century Europe's changing political and worldview landscape. The prose lacks vivid, lived body detail and is often less than memorable. The lack of flare is more obvious in the political and social history sections, while the worldview chapters tend to be stronger. More primary source quotations would've enhanced a basically solid treatment.

View all my reviews >>

Statements of Faith

Rationalism puts faith in reason.

Empiricism puts faith in experience.

Postmodernism puts faith in individual autonomy.

Christianity puts faith in Christ and his revelation.

The Spirit of Modernity

Modernism broke up the medieval synthesis and tried to hold civilization together with science and statecraft. Postmodernity reduces modernism to individual autonomy, and is thus not only a critique of modernity but a salvaging of its spirit.

Post-modern Fascism

Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview by Gene Edward Veith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Veith distinguishes modern, monocultural fascism like that of the Nazis from the postmodern, multi-cultural fascism of liberal governments. Fascism asserts control through the state and media propaganda and is hostile to any notion of a transcendent God. Fascists prefer a spirituality of immanent gods, goddesses, and spirits, because these pose no threat to state authority. Veith argues that this explains why both kinds of Fascists hate traditional Judaism and Christianity.

I would argue that Fascism is ultimately self-defeating, because the only way to defy God's transcendence is to make itself transcendent. This happened explicitly in Nazi Germany and Italy and the state has been extending itself over liberal governments throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the Judeo-Christian worldview God defines the state and the individual. Under Fascism the individual gets to define himself under the state.

Veith's book is an Eye-opening good read, but the thesis suffers a little from a lack of primary source material. I think Veith needs to establish a historical link between modern and postmodernism fascism. Otherwise we are left with guilt by association. For instance, Veith seems to imply that since both groups have the same artistic views there is a link. But correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

View all my reviews >>

We Become What We Study

This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

A Monologue on Conversation

We need good conversation. We are verbal creations, actually verbalized into existence and fashioned in the image of the Word. To be good conversationalists we need to be good listeners, thinkers, and speakers. Most of all we want our rhetoric to be memorable.

Conversation, as I know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates, up and over, in and out spinning and leaping, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off the end of old clay pipes anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then--phut!--vanished, with nothing at all, nothing.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Conversing well means using vivid images, metaphors, and turns of phrase. We also need fidelity to truth if we want to resonate with our discussion partners. There is nothing more tiring than listening to bubbles. It is also desirable to leave silence and not go on endlessly bubbling. Our contributions should be more like popcorn and less like posing.

Does anyone desire to turn this monologue into a cybersation?

The Metamorphosis of a Burden

Leve fit quod bene fertur onus.

(A burden borne well is light)

Ovid

"To thin to plow"

Twain loved the Mississippi, except when it came through a faucet. The drinking water in St. Louis was, he wrote, “too thick to drink and too thin to plow…. It comes out of the turbulent bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution.” Such richness had undoubtedly played a large part in giving St. Louis its taste for beer.

William Everdell The First Moderns, 209.

Reality Control

1984 by George Orwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Classic distopia. The government wants total control. Since reality exists only in the mind, the government hijacks reality through mind control. Newspeak resonates with today's political correctness and doublethink is the postmodern ability to believe two contradictory notions at the same time. Revisionism and propaganda on the telescreen is the key. "He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past."

The totalitarian government of Big Brother is watching for any indication of thought crime and even facial twitches are face crime. Big Brother feels threatened by the family and sex and anything that bonds people together in superior loyalties. Thus the jr. anti-sex league tries to limit fertilization to the laboratory and Big Brother makes it fun to turn in your parents for thought crime. He wants to be your family. You really root for Winston Smith, but when you realize that Big Brother is omnipresent you get a sinking feeling.

Orwell strikes me as a non-totalitarian socialist who hates the USSR for corrupting socialism. Orwell get religion wrong. Big Brother would've allowed the proles (20th c. peasants) to have religion but it turns out that they really didn't want it. Big Brother was pushing a new opiate of endless war and the proles "got a new drug."

Some writers like Tolkien make a little bit happen over many pages, but Orwell can make a lot happen in just a few. He is a splendid writer and story teller. I look forward to Animal Farm.

View all my reviews >>

Losing Confidence

After the post-modern turn, we are suffering from a loss of confidence in at least two areas. We question the reliability of our senses to put us in touch with reality, and the reliability of our words to convey it.