Home Stretch For The Dissertation

Hi gang,

After many years of darkness, light is beginning to dawn at the end of the tunnel. My advisor wants me to aim for finishing and defending the dissertation by the end of the quarter (woo-hoo!), so I'll be on a marathon to finish the final bits of it and do some revisions for the next 10 weeks. Unfortunately, that means that I'll have to neglect my blog until then. Still, feel free to leave a comment, and that'll function as a post-it note of sorts for me to return to and comment. Please accept my rain checks until then.

In the meantime, I'd like to ask you all a favor: if you catch me posting or commenting here, or at any other blog, please call me on it, and tell me to get back to work on my dissertation -- you have my permission (and encouragement!) to bark at me about it. My family is depending on me to finish, so that they can continue to eat and have a roof over their heads, and so that we can finally move on to the next stage of our lives together.

Yours sincerely,

exapologist

p.s., although I'll be on blogging hiatus until I finish, I can still be reached by email.

New Philosophy of Religion Blog

Last time, I mentioned Mike Almeda's post at the philosophy of religion blog, Prosblogion. I just found out that Mike started his own philosophy of religion blog, and it looks to be excellent. You can find it by clicking here.

Interesting Discussion on Non-Objectivist Accounts of Moral Facts and the Problem of Evil

Here. The poster -- Michael Almeida -- is another hot up-and-comer in the field of philosophy of religion. Prosblogion is *the* philosophy of religion blog on the web. All the contributors are either professional philosophers themselves, or philosophy grad students nearing completion of their PhDs. As such, I don't recommend commenting there if you don't have a significant philosophical background.

Almeida's remarks provide a nice corrective to popular apologetic jibes to the effect that the atheist or agnostic who raises the problem of evil presupposes objective morality -- or even theism(!).

I'd like to note that Prosblogion is a great place to see what civil discussion between people who disagree actually looks like in practice. Theirs is an environment where "light" is maximized and "heat" is minimized, leading to real progress at getting to the bottom of issues. A lot of bloggers -- myself included -- could really learn a thing or two about this from just reading them from the sidelines for several months. It has a tendency to rub off, and that's a good thing!