First and foremost, I am a wife, homemaker, mother, and teacher of my own children. That is my vocation. Everything else is an avocation to one degree or another. Most of my time is spent on those ordinary homemaking tasks that women have done (for the most part, pace the feminists, happily) for most of human history--cleaning, cooking, and caring for children. Living as I do (lucky me) in 21st century America, I get to obtain food by the simple expedient of driving to nearby stores and shopping, and this takes a fair bit of my time as well.
Homeschooling two school-age children, one already starting some high school work, with a four-year-old tagging along, is a huge time-taker, but it’s a responsibility I would not be without. You probably won’t find a lot of information on this site about homeschooling, because I’m too busy doing it to talk about it. But I recommend it highly and urge all intelligent parents who love their young children at least to teach them to read, using phonics, even if the hapless children are then turned over to a school for the rest of their education. On this topic I highly recommend Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch. I can attest that the method Flesch describes works like a charm, even if you didn’t think you could do it. My youngest, nearly 5, can now read quite well, having been taught purely by phonics. I am very slowly working on an unprofessional e-book on teaching your child to read and have about three chapters finished, plus many word lists that go far beyond the notes I’ve actually written up for parents. If you are interested in using this material, please make contact with me, and we can try to figure out a way to get it to you. As the material currently exists in the form of many different files (separate files for separate lists teaching different concepts), it would be tedious either to send or to download all the files separately. However, I can send sample files as file attachments, and it may be possible to put it on a CD for interested people, provided I don’t get swamped with requests. Eventually I hope to have all the lists available in a more convenient form for electronic transfer.
Analytic epistemology is one of my most fun avocations, even if it is one I don’t get to spend much time on. My husband, Tim, and I have just published a book with Routledge. Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason is available from Amazon for the iniquitous price of $120, for which I apologize, though I had no say in selecting the price. Pressure your university library to buy a copy…or two. The book defends a whole slew of unfashionable theses—that a priori knowledge is infallible, that the Gettier problem requires no concessions to externalism, that induction can be seen a priori to be rational, that externalism leads to epistemic nihilism…you get the picture. It should be a much-hated book, which I don’t mind provided it is read.
It is my work in philosophy that motivated the development of this site, because I wanted a place to post my curriculum vitae and some papers and current work. Since I am a contributor to
What’s Wrong with the World as well as to a personal blog, I thought it would be just as well if readers could find me on the web and get some sense of what I have done philosophically.
I am (as readers of my various blog posts know) politically very conservative and opinionated. The murder of the innocent, born and unborn, seems to me a crux of our time. If we don’t get it right when it comes to protecting innocent human beings from horrific slaughter—and we are getting it disastrously wrong, and worse all the time—our society will go to hell in a handbasket quite soon. Grousing about the evils in the world (many, but unfortunately not all, caused by liberals and their ilk) is one of the things I do most of in what spare time I have.
I’m an entirely traditional Christian—deity of Christ, resurrection, the whole works. (And don’t get me started on the evils of the Emergent Church movement.) Raised a fundamentalist Baptist, I’m now a member of a continuing Anglican church. Continuing Anglicans use the 1928 Prayer Book and do not ordain women. Hymnody is one of my great interests. I’ve had the enormous privilege of learning most of the hymns found in any old-fashioned Baptist hymnal and, since I’ve been in the continuing Anglican church, adding to that many wonderful Anglican hymns that I’d never known before. My kids are, of course, learning them all too. I hold a hymn sing at my house for homeschooling families and other Christian friends every six weeks to two months.