Rhetoric

Mr. Stewart (J.D.) is a corporate bankruptcy attorney living in Atlanta who has temporarily put his legal career on hold to write a work of fiction inspired by the place of his upbringing in North Georgia.

He received his B.A. in History from Columbia University, where he was an All-American, All-Ivy League, National Champion lightweight rower, and a Dean's List student every semester. He attended the University of Georgia School of Law where he graduated cum laude in the top 10% of his class. While in law school, he competed in the world's largest and most prestigious international moot court competition, competing against thousands of law students from across the world, and in which he was awarded an international "Best Oralist" award. He also took first place in Georgia's moot court competition, during which he also received the award for Best Oralist. 

This will be Mr. Stewart's first year teaching. Fittingly, he will be teaching two courses: logic followed by rhetoric. Mastery of both was essential to his moot court success and he believes it is also most essential to surviving the modern landscape, with its ubiquitous attacks upon our minds and principles. Whether it be parsing a professor's language and dissecting the subtext of their lesson (or attempted subliminal messaging), or understanding why politicians speak one way or another, Jim will prepare his students to grapple with the power of language and logic: how to pierce the veil of an orator's words and understand oft-concealed meanings, and how to wield that power themselves. 

Jim is the son of a convert Catholic and was raised in the Catholic Church. While Jim is not himself a practicing Catholic, he is a staunch and passionate defender of Christian ideals and the Christian way of life. As Jim once said in an undergraduate discussion session (for which he was summoned to the professor's office and formally warned regarding his "offensive" comments): "The greatest, most insidious, lie our society has been sold is that Logic acts as some antidote to Christianity, that one cannot live in the presence of the other." 

Jim's Logic and Rhetoric courses will be non-sectarian, that is, not founded on a religious or theological curriculum, but his students will not be taught that logical reasoning is incompatible with the existence of God or the teachings of any Christian denomination. Just the opposite, in fact! His students will learn to parse and break down the twisted rhetoric of those who would have them walk away from their faith, and how to identify the logical fallacies which such naysayers unfailingly rely upon.