Author Archives: Caleb Coy

Lessons from a Tampa Tantrum

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One of the lessons I’m going to teach my son one day is this: I have an apple and Mikey and Tommy both have an apple too, but they each want another apple. Joey has never had an apple and wants to try one, so I decide to give him mine. But Mikey and Tommy are big bullies, and Joey gets picked on, so if I give him an apple they’re just gonna take it away from him most likely. Tommy’s always been the bigger bully (at least that’s what Mikey always says), and so I might as well give my apple to Mikey instead of Joey because if I give it to Joey and Mikey and Tommy try to get it, Tommy might get it instead of Mikey.

What I’m going to teach my son is that it’s very important for me to give Joey my apple no matter what Mikey and Tommy say or do, even if I know they’ll take it away. Because there are four people who need to see it happen. What I will not teach my son is that giving an apple to Joey is the same as giving it to Tommy because he’s a big old bully.

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Sustainable Hobbiton: Found my dream hood

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Real Life Hobbit Village Proves the Greenest Way to Live is Like Bilbo Baggins

A real life hobbit village.  And it’s sustainable.

I remember reading an article in the St. Austin Review that described Tolkien’s Hobbiton as an embodiment of a social philosophy known as “distributism.”  G.K. Chesterton was a big proponent of it.  Wendell Berry—know him?  You could call him one too.

It’s basically agrarianism where everyone is a peasant and nobody is a lord.  In Hobbiton, all the farms are for sustaining the community, not trading with the outside world at large.  The mill is the closest thing to an industry, but once again it is for producing enough for the Shire.  “Distributists were ‘greens’ before anyone had the label,” and it certainly wasn’t because they worshipped the earth or anything.  As Christians, they believed not that all creation was God, but that all creation was God’s temple.

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I am not a shadows scholar

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An Academic Ghostwriter, the ‘Shadow Scholar,’ Comes Clean

As a teacher, I feel I need to come out and say now that I am not a shadow scholar.  I do not write papers for students.  I have never written a paper for a student.

However, once I did completely re-write a paper for a fellow student when I was in college.  It was the summer, he was taking a marketing course online, he wrote a paper describing a plan to market and sell paper towels that “open easier” because there is an opening tear strip, everyone knew it’s easy to open paper towels by poking the top hole, and he had a lot to work on in terms of grammar and mechanics besides.  So I completely rewrote his paper.  The trade-off: He let me cleaned the lazer tag arena for me while I “edited” the paper.

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Pat Robertson is a false prophet: Not that this is anything new

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We don’t really pay attention to Pat Robertson.  Me and the people I know.  Goobers that we are, we’re wise enough to know he is incapable of being trusted about anything remotely spiritual.  In fact, one could create a guide on how to be a good Christian by merely saying, “don’t act like this man at all.”

But Pat Robertson isn’t Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist.  WBB is rather benign, since there is a small number of them and nobody takes them seriously.  No, Robertson is much worse.  He commands a media empire, and countless people look up to him.  Professed Christians are looking up to a servant of Shaitan.

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A Fist Full of Berries: Nobody Reads in Panem?

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The Hunger Games movie is coming out on DVD tomorrow.  I remember first hearing about the book.  I’m like, “neat teens book idea.  A little violent sounding.”

The idea sounded silly.  Then I saw the movie.  Then read the book.  Then the others.

On the surface, the idea seems very profane.  Kids killing each other.  For entertainment.  What has society come to?  But if you read these books what you soon realize is that the book is using such a profane thing to ask questions about what entertains us, and what we are willing to embrace and accept, what we are passionate about changing and what lengths we will go to to make that happen, and what the consequences are of those lengths.  And if you think that was a run-on sentence, then you see how oppression and violence can likewise run on and on and on, if we don’t do something to stop it.


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The 10 Suggestions: A Public School Solution

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It’s been a whole summer since the decision in Giles Co. VA to remove the ten commandments from a public display and replace them with an alternative.  This week many students will be going back to school, and some might even notice this new display when they pass by it.  Maybe.

I didn’t go up on a mountain, didn’t have a personal conversation with God, and my face is not glowing.  But I have read his book, his good book, and I can’t give you any new commandments.  Not that I need to.
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