Autumn is my favorite season of the year, and October is my favorite month. This is not surprising for a native New Englander, since turning leaves together with crisp, sunny and cool days are an attractive combination. Even on this particular middle-of-October day as I write, when it is unseasonably warm and humid with a threat of heavy rain later, a few typically beautiful fall days in the past week and the promise of more to come keeps me weather-happy.... Read more
I am a fan of all New England pro sports teams, but my attachment to the Red Sox is greater than my attachment to the Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins combined. The Patriots, lacking their all-world quarterback Tom Brady, have unexpectedly won their first three games of the season, but I have hardly noticed. That’s because the Red Sox, who have ended up in last place in their division each of the previous two seasons, are the champions of the AL... Read more
In Milos Forman’s 1984 Academy Award winning film Amadeus, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, played by Jeffrey Jones of Ferris Buehler’s Day Off fame, is most of the time an enlightened ruler who makes his decisions after considering the advice of his cabinet entourage who accompany him wherever he goes. Yet he is an Emperor, after all, so there is often uncertainty about how to interact with this very powerful “first among equals.” Those who enter the Emperor’s presence often... Read more
The heart of Providence College’s core curriculum is the Development of Western Civilization (DWC) program, a sixteen-credit, four-semester, interdisciplinary and team-taught series of courses required of all freshmen and sophomores regardless of major. From its origin in the 1970s, DWC (or “Civ,” as many call it) has been both a regular source of pride and occasionally of controversy, both of which have been the case recently. I have taught in the program for sixteen of the twenty-one years I have... Read more
As I wait impatiently for my sabbatical that is under contract with a publisher to return from the editor, I’ve been thinking about some of my blog essays that “made the cut” in some sense to appear in revised form in my book-to-be. One of these essays is about the challenge of cultivating the right attitude with which to enter the world on a daily basis. I learned a lot about this from Rami Nashishibi when he was interviewed a... Read more
Last Friday I attended a talk on campus by civil rights lawyer and and law professor Greg Lukianoff on issues of free speech, trigger warnings, and a related host of matters on college and university matters that are regularly in the news. He is the co-author of an article in The Atlantic a bit over a year ago that raised a lot of eyebrows and generated a lot of conversation. I wrote about it in the early weeks of my sabbatical... Read more
A few years ago, Jeanne returned from a weekend with a friend in Vermont with a little plant in a box—a Vermont blackberry bush. It has been trying to take over our back yard ever since. It has also recently been the source of a fascinating, ongoing conversation that Jeanne and I have had about fruit, growth, and how to bring what is greater than us into the world. Our new family member looked innocent enough, but it actually had... Read more
I love The Onion. A couple of weeks ago they reported on a sad event at the Vatican: Angel flies into window at the Vatican The story reminded me of another damaged angel who I wrote about not long ago . . . As I sat at home last Tuesday, doing the things I would normally have been doing in my office on a Tuesday (thanks Winter Storm Juno for coming on a day I don’t have classes), I managed... Read more
Every year the world is invaded by millions of tiny barbarians. We call them “children.” Hannah Arendt One of the wonderfully gratuitous features of my early years as a college professor was the opportunity to teach regularly with a couple of master teachers. During the first decade of my teaching career at Providence College, I taught on an interdisciplinary Honors Development of Western Civilization team every year with two such colleagues. Rodney was a teaching icon from the English department... Read more
Last Thursday, in just our second class of the semester, I had the opportunity to introduce my ethics students to the master of all things ethical. The key to Aristotle’s understanding of the life of human flourishing is that such a life depends on the formation of the best habits—the virtues—to guide one’s life. Aristotle conceived of the life of freedom and moral excellence as a life constructed out of the virtues, good habits that, when cultivated, incline a person to... Read more
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