Pontifications of the Listener-in-Chief

Below are links to selected writings on a variety of subjects.

Unless otherwise noted, all are in PDF format.

Mind map of Barriers to Faith book

A semi-current "map" of the current book project on Barriers of Faith: Discourses on Listening, Common Ground, and the Needs of Economic Higher Education in an Anarchic World. Where the work begun in "Economic History in the Age of Wikis and iPods" is taking me.

Economic History in the Age of Wikis and iPods: Is It Time To Adopt Pedagogy from an Alternate Universe?

Working paper. Presented in Providence, Rhode Island, at the 31st annual conference of the Economic and Business Historical Society, April 26-28, 2007. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Oxford Roundtable, Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, August 13-18, 2006. Early explorations of the listening needs of higher education in the the 21st century.

Making McCloskey's Rhetoric Empirical: Company Law and Tragedies of the Commons in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Paper presented at "Rhetoric and Economics," an interdisciplinary conference held in Decatur, Illinois, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Deirdre McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics, Milliken University, June 6-9, 2005. Paper has since been published in Edward C. Clift, ed., How Language Is Used to Do Business: Essays on the Rhetoric of Economics, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York, 2008. Detailed and painstaking historical analysis that draws upon 70 years worth of archival sources on Parliamentary activity and company prospectuses that illustrates what can be involved in trying to evaluate actual business listening costs.

Copywriting for the Small Business Market: How to Find the “Acres of Diamonds” in Your Own Back Yard

My e-book on copywriting for small business. NOTE: this link is to the sales letter for the e-book, not to the e-book itself. LINK (will open in new window).

Can one be a Christian Anarchist?

A short essay, first published in The Mustard Seed (April 2003), on how "Christian Anarchist" is neither oxymoron nor bad idea.

Faith and the Teaching of Economics

Another short Mustard Seed essay, this one from March 2003, on how a Christian economist might teach differently.