Stephen L. Young

Evangelical Influencers: OMG y'all, Christianity is superior because it undermined all the evil sexism of its day and eventually Christianity led to women's rights! Early Christian writers...

Some of my 9/11 memories are vivid. It was just a few weeks into my first year of college at UNC, and I was in my Tue/Thur 8:00-9:15 Ancient Greece class. I'd already started a practice that stuck with me for the rest of college: a 2-3 min break during 75 min classes to walk to a water fountain 1/

Here is something to remember about firefighters and Tuesday, September 11th 2001: 343 FDNY heroes were killed that day. Many of them when the towers collapsed because, unlike narcissist lying stolen-valor ghouls like Trump, they had run inside the burning melting buildings to rescue people. 12/

Some of my 9/11 memories are vivid. It was just a few weeks into my first year of college at UNC, and I was in my Tue/Thur 8:00-9:15 Ancient Greece class. I'd already started a practice that stuck with me for the rest of college: a 2-3 min break during 75 min classes to walk to a water fountain 1/

One friend did join the military after 9/11 and became a Ranger who deployed to Afghanistan (?). Another started what became 8 or so semesters of studying Arabic because he wanted to learn abt people and cultures 'over there' to further mutual human empathy. We all huddled together that Tuesday. 10/

Some of my 9/11 memories are vivid. It was just a few weeks into my first year of college at UNC, and I was in my Tue/Thur 8:00-9:15 Ancient Greece class. I'd already started a practice that stuck with me for the rest of college: a 2-3 min break during 75 min classes to walk to a water fountain 1/

For some reason I knew my dad was traveling for work in the Northeast. I didn't have a cell phone, so another student lent me theirs and I called either my mom or my dad's office assistant (can't remember which I called first) and was quickly assured dad was ok, as was my aunt who lived in NYC. 8/

Some of my 9/11 memories are vivid. It was just a few weeks into my first year of college at UNC, and I was in my Tue/Thur 8:00-9:15 Ancient Greece class. I'd already started a practice that stuck with me for the rest of college: a 2-3 min break during 75 min classes to walk to a water fountain 1/

Class continued and finished at 9:15. It wasn't until I was walking across campus and saw more folks running than usual at 9am that any of us began to think something was up, but what? There was a crowd at the Student Union. The second plane had already hit. We watched the rest on big TVs there. 6/

Some of my 9/11 memories are vivid. It was just a few weeks into my first year of college at UNC, and I was in my Tue/Thur 8:00-9:15 Ancient Greece class. I'd already started a practice that stuck with me for the rest of college: a 2-3 min break during 75 min classes to walk to a water fountain 1/

This is one vivid memory: When I saw the little hyperlink about the first plane hitting the WTC, I didn't think much about it at all. I assumed it meant a little Cessna had accidentally crashed into the building. So my thought was, "Well that really sucks for them," and then I went back to class. 4/

Some of my 9/11 memories are vivid. It was just a few weeks into my first year of college at UNC, and I was in my Tue/Thur 8:00-9:15 Ancient Greece class. I'd already started a practice that stuck with me for the rest of college: a 2-3 min break during 75 min classes to walk to a water fountain 1/

At that point in the semester the tenured prof was dimming the lights and showing slides (like, from an actual slide projector, not Ppt) of broken pieces of Greek pottery so that he could eventually give an early midterm on them and get people who had slept through the slides to drop the class. 2/

Holy crap. "Paul Within Paganism," the book I co-edited w/ Paula Fredriksen & @alexichantz.bsky.social, got a long review essay in The New Yorker! Still sifting through the disparate threads Gopnik tries to tie together. Well earned shout-outs in it to @ryancollman.bsky.social @zafulotus.bsky.social

I know the USA Men's hockey team won't hear me, but whatever... -Guys, your 🥇 win was epic & awesome, just like our women's team. Stop listening to US Hockey PR and say: "I'm sorry we laughed along with the President's misogyny. We need to be better. It's always wrong to belittle and mock women."

My courses now (w/o accommodation letter) ban all devices in class, have only in-class handwritten or oral assessment, and require printed handouts of readings since university only provides e-versions of books. I often provide handouts, though it's been an enormous waste of my time to make them.

I cannot stress enough that without such device-removing course redesigns, for which work professors are not being compensated (!), AI absolutely ends any semblance of a learning and discussion community in the classroom plus almost any educational benefit for students.