Essays

2021

• When a Fool Is More Than a Fool | The Curator, 1 February 2021
• The Role of a Questioner | Englewood Review of Books, 25 January 2021

2020

• Four Ways Lamenting Is Better Than Grumbling | Southern Hills Connects, 17 April 2020
• Thanksgiving: A Task for Quarantined Christians | Southern Hills Connects, 30 March 2020
• In Hard Times and All Times, May We Sing God Alone | Southern Hills Connects, 24 March 2020
• Aaron Belz Writes the Sort of Poetry That We Need | FORMA Review, 19 March 2020

2019

• Punching My Adult Card: 10 Stamps in 10 Years | The Curator, 30 December 2019
• Basic Performance | The Curator, 7 November 2019 (Essay unavailable)
• Pushing the Continuum: A Review of The Gospel Comes with a House Key by Rosaria Butterfield | The Curator, 24 April 2019
• Harrison Scott Key’s Congratulations, Who Are You Again? A Review | Englewood Review of Books, 17 April 2019
• There’s a New Door to Narnia and the Children Want In | The Curator 10 April 2019
• Rapid City Full of A-Plus Students | Rapid City Journal, 1 April 2019
• Growing a Fuller Portrait of Marat | The Curator, 18 March 2019
• Embedding Education Outside Manipulative Institutions: A Reflection on Ivan Illich, Schools, and Public Libraries | The Curator, 27 February 2019
• Was John Adams a vain little man? | The Curator, 4 February 2019
• Controlled by Those Who Hate You: A Review of Hitler’s Pawn | The Curator, 7 January 2019

2018

• The Crime of the Spoiler | The Curator, 10 December 2018
• When the Least of These Speak: A Review of Jesse Ball’s Census | The Curator, 26 November 2018
• The Freedom of Obscurity | The Curator, 5 November 2018
• Training My Enemies | Mockingbird, 12 March 2018

2017

• The Niche Future of Handwriting
• Satire as a Narrowing Agent

2016

• The Cost of Customization | The Curator, 27 September 2016
• A Review of Barton Swaim’s Memoir, The Speechwriter | The Curator, 22 April 2016
• The Turkey Bomber | The Curator, 29 March 2016

2015

• Caring Who Wins | The Curator, 2 November 2015
• The Payoff | The Curator, 13 March 2015
• Asking Students to Keep a Commonplace Book

2014

• Reading The Road as a father, vulnerable to McCarthy’s probing tension
• Adoption in Reality | The Curator, 2 July 2014
• Aaron Belz’s humorous verse tethers readers to reality

2012-2013

• Considering how small groups can be an appropriate way to structure church
• To Be Taught Is to Be Known
• How my attempts at Advent spark liturgical longings
• The Livestrong Myth: What the USADA’s report means about Lance Armstrong’s legacy
• My Philosophy of Education
• Me and the Legislature: A relationship fostered by Daugaard’s plan for education

2011

• Called to Adopt: Our Growth into a New Ministry
• What My Family Can Teach My Bureaucracy

Before 2011:

On life

• I threw away my baseball cards this week
• The Face I Need
• Who do you want on the opposite side of that door?

On literature

• Real Life Odysseus
• Deciding Who Wrote Shakespeare Matters to Me
• Hide not my children from these stories with evil
• Approaching poetry as an explorer and grasping its greatness
• The 20 Best Children’s Books . . . according to my children, so far

On learning

• What My Family Can Teach My Bureaucracy
• A Few Ideas for Systematic Change in Education
• Grammar: The Most Relevant Content No One Teaches
• When it comes to reading, patience is a discipline
• Collaboration at a Distance: A case for collaborative learning in distance education
• Using Portfolios: A Review of Literature Regarding the Use of Portfolios in K-12 Education
• The diffusion of wikis – a question no one asked me
• Time to think: The importance for non-experts to pause for reflection
• The wiki as knowledge repository: Using a wiki in a community of practice to strengthen K-12 education
• The Eight Web Tools I Use Most
• Blogging: A technological aid to building effective learning communities
• Blogs, books, and students’ choice: Can I combine them into something useful?