Why Being Uncomfortable is a Good Thing

Last updated on: September 20, 2024 at 8:44 am By Vance Morgan

A new podcast that I’ve been enjoying recently is Ali Velshi’s “Banned Book Club”–I highly recommend it. An item popped up on my Facebook news feed not long ago reporting that Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird had recently been pulled from a junior-high reading list in a Mississippi school district. Lee’s novel has raised controversy ever since its publication for racist language and dated racial stereotypes, but in this case the explanation for banning the book was straightforward.... Read more

Jesus and a Four-Letter Word

Last updated on: September 16, 2024 at 3:13 pm By Vance Morgan

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Next week will be one of my favorite teaching weeks of the semester as I get to give a lecture, then lead two seminars, on the work of Karl Marx. I always feel like a bit of a reprobate when I teach Marx–and that’s a good thing. I get to teach many of the people I was taught as a child to both fear and ignore–Marx is the first of them. My impression growing up was that “Marx” was one... Read more

Comfort is vastly overrated

Last updated on: September 15, 2024 at 7:04 am By Vance Morgan

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In the interdisciplinary, team-taught course I am participating in this semester, we spent our second week on issues related to slavery. One of our central texts was Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, whose subtitle is “A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” How the Word is Passed is both stunning and disturbing. The flyleaf describes the book as “an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that... Read more

Corrupted Memory Files

Last updated on: September 12, 2024 at 4:29 pm By Vance Morgan

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My youngest son, Justin, has a remarkable memory–for, as he puts it, “totally useless facts.” By the time he was ten or eleven, I had learned never to challenge his memory of a basketball game we attended, of a conversation from months or years earlier, or a movie. Thanks to me and my forcing Justin and his brother Caleb to watch my favorite movies from the time they were very young, Justin knows every line of dialogue from “Dead Poets... Read more

Remembering Frieda–a dog who was a person

Last updated on: September 10, 2024 at 8:49 am By Vance Morgan

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Facebook reminded me that we lost our beloved dachshund Frieda six years ago yesterday. She lived a long life–a bit over 14 years–and left an indelible mark. In her honor I’m repeating the very first blog post I ever wrote for this blog, over a dozen years ago. A bit of background first. For that first post twelve years ago, I chose an essay that I had written at a writer’s conference several years earlier. At that time, I was... Read more

What Does a Mature Faith Look Like?

Last updated on: September 3, 2024 at 2:22 pm By Vance Morgan

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I detect that a rebellion against all things “religious” is growing on me. Often it amounts to an instinctive horror. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Not long ago I had the opportunity to use Leo Tolstoy’s Confessions in class for the first time. There are many passages worthy of discussion in Tolstoy’s spiritual memoir, none more important than when, toward the end of his story, he describes his frustration when he discovers that members and clergy of the Orthodox Church that he has recently... Read more

First Day of Class Dreams and Nightmares

Last updated on: September 3, 2024 at 2:34 pm By Vance Morgan

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Last Tuesday was the first day of classes on my campus for the 2024-25 academic year. It kicked off my thirty-eighth consecutive year standing in front of the classroom—thirty in my current position at Providence College, three at Christian Brothers University, and four as a graduate student teacher in my master’s and doctoral programs. You would think that after that many years in the classroom I would have gotten over first-day-of-class nerves a long time ago. But no. On Monday... Read more

In all they do, they prosper

Last updated on: September 2, 2024 at 7:31 am By Vance Morgan

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There are two kinds of living things. They are distinguished by the strategies they have developed in response to perceived threat and danger. One kind responds to danger by running away from it, developing strategies and evolving tools to sidestep threats in more and more complex and sophisticated ways. We call this kind of living thing Animals. The other kind’s strategy is to hunker down, grow roots along with protective armor, and face danger by refusing to be moved. We... Read more

A Labor Day Question: What Does the Lord Require of Us?

Last updated on: August 29, 2024 at 4:35 pm By Vance Morgan

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There are a couple of sayings attributed to Jesus that Christians often use when attempting to show that following Jesus and a commitment to capitalism are compatible with each other–I’ve encountered each of them recently. In a Facebook thread, a person noted that since Jesus said that “God helps those who helps themselves,” clearly he would endorse the capitalist work ethic of competition and self-promotion. Then on the site formerly known as Twitter, someone quoted Jesus as saying that “If... Read more

Getting Comfortable with Paradox

Last updated on: August 29, 2024 at 4:07 pm By Vance Morgan

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It is standard fare for Christians to believe that human beings are made of body and soul, physical stuff and a mysterious “non-physical” something called the soul—which turns out to be the most important part of what we are. I often put my students—many of whom are products of twelve years of Catholic parochial education—in groups and ask them to come up with a definition of the word “soul.” Their collective definitions always indicate that the soul is the part of... Read more