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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. During his remarks at the Democratic National Convention last week, Rev. Al Sharpton quoted Psalm 30:5—“Weeping may stay for the night, but joy comes in the morning. As an excellent preacher should do, he repeated joy comes in the morning several times with increasing volume, met each time by the increasing cheers of the crowd. He knew his audience—these... Read more
Today is the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Here is my entry for this Sunday in my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy. Today’s gospel is the last of several Sundays spent in John 6, Jesus’s “Bread of life” discourse. A number of Jesus’ followers have finally had enough, complaining that “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” When Jesus responds with a few more of his patented cryptic remarks, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer... Read more
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