"Who is Joe Morris?" his son asks, and answers: a boisterous, exasperating retired judge with the New York State Departmentnof Motor Vehicles, "fully conversant with the idea of happiness, especially his own".
When students have to calibrate sensors, even future philosophers or kindergarten teachers must become conversant with the idea that sensors transform one or another physical or chemical quantity to voltage, and they must connect these two quantities.
Mr. Reagan was a puckish booster for Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt (he admired F.D.R.'s dramatic style, not his ideology), and he was conversant with the ideas of Russell Kirk and some other conservative thinkers of his day, which he used to buttress his preconceptions about big government.
In addition, while students may be aware of (but not conversant with) the fundamental ideas of variation and natural selection, they are generally not aware of the kinds of evidence and reasoning that support these ideas.
Though it is impossible to determine exactly when Darwin became a transmutationist, the evidence suggests that he was conversant with the transmutational ideas of Lamarck and others and testing ("experimenting" with) them before he received a copy of Lyell's Principles of Geology, vol. 2, in November 1832, in which Lyell describes and disputes Lamarck's theory.
We now have young people studying to become Islamic scholars within the American context through the newly instituted Zaytuna College, whose mission is "to educate and prepare morally committed professional, intellectual, and spiritual leaders, who are grounded in the Islamic scholarly tradition and conversant with the cultural currents and critical ideas shaping modern society".
However, although it may seem astonishing to those not conversant with the criminal justice system, there is some truth to the idea that prosecutors seek informants with a level of "street cred" that enables them to liaise with, and inform on, the criminal community.
As a Catholic, he was certainly conversant with the Devil.
"You also have to be conversant with the new media world.
And no one conversant with the situation believes that the end is in sight.
And one-time fiber barons are quickly becoming conversant with the arcana of the bankruptcy code.
