2014-12-31T07:30:27-04:00

“Get a picture of yourself ten years from now in your mind,” I said to my eighteen-year old freshmen. “Your job, whether you’ll be in a permanent relationship, whether you will have kids or have considered having them, where you’ll be living, graduate school or not. The works.” Most of them had smiles on their faces as they constructed their future selves in their imaginations. We were studying the Stoics, so I suspect they were wondering what this exercise had... Read more

2014-12-12T07:30:44-04:00

Final exams begin next week, so I’m getting ready for the next round of reading surprising things that my students have learned. One of the things I learned shortly after becoming a college professor twenty years ago was that there is a certain sort of black humor that teachers find particularly entertaining. Contributions used to be anonymously tacked onto bulletin boards in faculty break rooms; now, they tend to spread like a virus on Facebook and other social media outlets.... Read more

2014-12-10T07:30:09-04:00

I recently finished re-reading Stephanie Saldana’s 2010 book The Bread of Angels, a book that has made the rounds in my house over the past two or three years. Jeanne and I have both read it twice; in between our first and second readings, a theology department colleague of mine had it on loan from Jeanne for over a year. Although I often describe myself as someone who reads for a living, I seldom read a book that I am... Read more

2014-12-03T07:30:17-04:00

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to observe a colleague in class, something I get to do with junior, non-tenured faculty as a program director on a regular basis. The topic of the lecture was various aspects of post-modern philosophy, a topic that promised to stun all those in attendance, me included, into soporific silence. But my colleague used PowerPoint and YouTube masterfully to provide illustrations of his basic post-modernist point—contemporary human beings have become so disconnected... Read more

2014-11-30T07:40:36-04:00

Today is Saint Andrew’s Sunday (which happens to fall this year on the actual Saint Andrew’s Day). This essay is in honor of the patron saint of Scotland, as well as my friend Marsue, who today will celebrate her last day of five years as priest at Trinity Episcopal Church before beginning a well-deserved retirement. Although I am a philosophy professor by trade, I believe William Shakespeare’s body of work is more insightful about my favorite philosophical topic—human nature—than anything... Read more

2014-11-26T07:30:09-04:00

I spent two hours of seminar last Friday with twelve honors freshmen enjoying the wonders of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the source of many of my favorite stories as a child. I was so taken with ancient mythology that I read it in secret at times I was supposed to be reading the Bible. The seminar reminded me of one of my earliest posts on this blog a couple of years ago–how stories shape our lives. Some of my favorite stories growing up... Read more

2014-11-21T07:30:28-04:00

I begin with a confession. As recently as a week ago in a Facebook posting I have been telling people all semester that in the middle of November I was going to be away for four days at a conference (I might have called it a “workshop” once or twice). I put up an “away” message on Outlook announcing my absence for four days from the administrative saddle because of travelling to a conference, let my “inner circle” blog circulation... Read more

2014-11-19T07:30:36-04:00

I recently submitted two grant proposals related to my sabbatical that will begin next July. The stakes are high–especially since I don’t handle rejection well. But I am a bit better at it than I used to be, thanks to something that happened toward the end of my last sabbatical . . . There’s nothing more pitiful than a grown man feeling sorry for himself. But that’s where I found myself a few years ago while on sabbatical. My first... Read more

2014-11-17T07:30:52-04:00

“There is a famous anecdote about an out-of-town tryout of the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Thornton Wilder was in attendance and remarked afterwards to Tennessee Williams that he thought Blanche DuBois was too complex a character for the theater. Tennessee is said to have replied, ‘People are complex, Thorn.’” I read the above anecdote in the program notes as Jeanne and I waited at a local theater for Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler to begin. What I know... Read more

2014-11-12T07:30:18-04:00

We are all going to die! That’s just so awful. I didn’t agree to this. How do we live in the face of this? Anne Lamott Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to engage with various groups of people in the classroom on occasional weekends. I’ve had a couple of these opportunities over the past three weekends. The topic is always the same–How to live a life of meaning and purpose in a world largely outside... Read more

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