Reading and Writing

Last updated on: January 4, 2016 at 7:07 am By Vance Morgan

My twenty-plus years teaching at Providence College have afforded me an opportunity every semester for team-teaching in the large interdisciplinary program that is the heart of our core curriculum (a program I directed for four years ending last July). Team-teaching is fun, exhilarating, and demanding; this begins with the planning of the next semester’s syllabus. Faculty from different departments having different experiences with and notions about pedagogy bring all sorts of ideas to the table and do not always agree,... Read more

Goliath was a Wimp: Random Observations for the New Year

Last updated on: January 2, 2016 at 7:30 am By Vance Morgan

The first measurable winter precipitation of the season rolled through town last Monday night, on the heels of sixty-five degree temperatures on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I found out on Weather.com that this mediocre, unimpressive two-inches-of-icy-crap-producing storm was given the name Winter Storm Goliath. I really hate that every winter system that produces a snowflake gets its own special name, but if we’re going Biblical with storm names this winter, I have some suggestions. Nebuchadnezzar. Zerubbabel. Mephibosheth. Habakkuk. Melchizedek.... Read more

The Best and the Worst: A Wish for the New Year

Last updated on: December 31, 2015 at 7:30 am By Vance Morgan

Love does not say “I ought to love”—it loves. Pity does not say “It is right to feel pity”—it pities. Justice does not say, “I am bound to be just”—it acts justly. George Eliot There are eight to ten movies that Jeanne and I watch religiously during the Christmas season, from the obvious (“It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas”) to a few that are not as well-known. We ended our annual Christmas movie-watching binge on Christmas Eve this year with... Read more

One Thing

Last updated on: December 29, 2015 at 7:30 am By Vance Morgan

In the 1991 movie City Slickers, Billy Crystal plays New York executive Mitch Robbins, whose hassled life is wearing negatively on his work, his marriage, and his friendships. At thirty-nine years old he finds himself deep in a midlife crisis. For his birthday, his two best buddies purchase a two-week vacation for the three of them at a dude ranch in New Mexico to participate in a dude cattle drive. As is usually the case with Billy Crystal, hilarity and... Read more

Remembering a Friend

Last updated on: December 26, 2015 at 7:30 am By Vance Morgan

“Happy Stoning Day!” Brother John said as he greeted me below the choir stalls after noon prayer. December 26 is the Feast of St. Stephen, officially designated as the first Christian martyr. Brother John, a guitar-picking, out-of-the-box product of the sixties, is not your typical Benedictine. “I’ve always wanted to play Dylan’s ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned’ at mass on St. Stephen’s Day,” he said. My kind of monk—irreverence is my favorite virtue. Stephen has always been a problem for me.... Read more

Lost in the Amazon

Last updated on: December 23, 2015 at 1:02 pm By Vance Morgan

Bookstores! For bibliophilic folks such as I, there is no more fascinating or attractive idea. The very notion of a place where I can spend the day surrounded by books, wandering here and there with no particular goal other than the hope that I might stumble across the book I’ve never seen by an author I’ve never heard of that will provide hours of entertainment, provoke new thoughts, and that might even, as Richard Rorty suggests, be the basis for... Read more

The Strong, Silent Type

Last updated on: December 22, 2015 at 7:30 am By Vance Morgan

In my religious tradition, we didn’t do saints. We did do Christmas pageants—big time. I remember in various pageants being an angel, a wise man, a shepherd—all of the usual male roles. My most triumphant pageant appearance, though, was the year I got to be Joseph. Wearing a white dish towel on my head secured with a bathrobe belt, I gazed with a holy aspect at the plastic headed Jesus in the make-shift manger while the narrator read the Christmas... Read more

Our Thoughts and Prayers Are Not Enough

Last updated on: December 12, 2015 at 7:30 am By Vance Morgan

On the day after the San Bernardino massacre, just the latest in what seems to be a weekly litany of mass violence in this country, I posted the following in frustration on my Facebook page: I’m tired–really tired–of hearing people say and seeing them write that “my thoughts and prayers are with” the victims of the latest mass shooting. God isn’t going to fix this, and the victims don’t need our prayers. They need us to f__king do something about the... Read more

Righteous Peace, Godly Glory

Last updated on: December 7, 2015 at 7:30 am By Vance Morgan

Over the past several weeks I have been working through the second draft of my current sabbatical book project; as I completed each chapter draft I had Jeanne, who is my “go to” reader for everything, to give me her impressions. After finishing one chapter she said that she liked it overall, but thought that I should rework the first section because it was “too depressing.” I made the suggested changes, replacing the opening section with something more upbeat and... Read more

This or That?

Last updated on: September 15, 2017 at 12:24 pm By Vance Morgan

I got into an interesting conversation the other day with someone who insisted that on the particular issue we were discussing, “all or nothing” was the rule—either one took one position or the other, with no room for nuance. The issue was an important one, but this “all or nothing,” “either/or” attitude is not unusual. Human beings are hard-wired to categorize things, including each other. This is a survival skill honed over the millennia through the evolutionary process. Faced with... Read more

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