Newsletter #11

On Nuance and Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings

For a sport like college basketball, which appears to be slowly dying, this year’s March Madness has been mostly riveting. Congratulations to the Duke Blue Devils for advancing to the men’s Final Four, and the South Carolina Gamecocks for advancing to the women’s Final Four.

Why We Need Nuance

One of my friends and fellow staff members at church once said that if I had a super power I would be “Nuance Man.” I laughed out loud when his wife first told me that; then he copped to it later.

He’s probably not wrong. I used to be accused of being a contrarian. And as I’ve considered that label through the years, I would concede that it has some validity. I do find that when conventional wisdom is running almost entirely in one direction, I instinctively wonder, “Are we all missing something here? Maybe there’s another angle here to be considered.”

I don’t consider this the problematic kind of contrarianism, the kind that always disagrees just to disagree as matter of feigned intellectual virtu…