Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement. It is a selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues–Iris Murdoch I recently found myself in the midst of a Facebook discussion, the sort of online discussion that I try to avoid at all costs. The topic was same-sex marriage; in the middle of some testy back and forth between persons of vastly different beliefs and commitments, one of the few students I am... Read more
A retreat at a Benedictine hermitage means the opportunity to plug into the daily cycle of psalms and prayers that has been going on for over fifteen hundred years. I learned five years ago as I experienced this daily cycle for the first time that something deep in me resonates with its rhythms. One June morning last summer, at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur bright and early at 5:30 Vigils, Psalm 5 began as a cry for someone, anyone, to listen.... Read more
The building looked like the love child of a logic problem and a crossword puzzle. Richard Powers, Orfeo During the summer I tend to plow through a book per week, making up for all of the months during the academic year when I do not have the time to read anything other than what I have assigned the students or have been assigned by my colleagues and superiors. Last week’s book was Richard Powers’ Orfeo. Powers is one of... Read more
Conversion is an odd phenomenon. I’ve often observed that those who convert, who ”tum around” radically in some aspect of their lives, tend to embrace their newly adopted beliefs and behaviors with a sense of urgency and commitment that can border on fanaticism. Thus those who quit smoking become front line enforcers in the “No Smoking” brigade, those who cut caffeine (or sugar, or anything significant) out of their diet will regale those of us who have not quit with... Read more
When we left the Bag last week, she was sitting between the captain’s chairs of a twenty-seven foot U-Haul truck with her parents headed from Memphis to Providence. She adjusted far better as a southern belle to New England than her parents from the deep north had adjusted to Memphis—but then Snow never had difficulty adjusting to anyone or anybody. Except our new landlord. For some reason, he was the one person Snow did not like; she growled at him... Read more
When we left The Bag last week, she was sitting between the captain’s chairs of a twenty-seven foot U-Haul truck with her parents headed from Memphis to Providence. She adjusted far better as a southern belle to New England than her parents from the deep north had adjusted to Memphis—but then Snow never had difficulty adjusting to anyone or anybody. Except our new landlord. For some reason, he was the one person Snow did not like; she growled at him every... Read more
There is a mystery in reading, a mystery which, if we contemplate it, may well help us, not to explain, but to grab hold of other mysteries in human life. Simone Weil My early years were full of apocryphal stories of how I learned to read. According to my mother, I was reading by age three without anyone having taught me how to do it. I was never without a book, and lined up my menagerie of stuffed animals on... Read more
Today is my lovely Jeanne’s birthday–please join me in celebrating my favorite person’s natal day! This essay was first posted on our twenty-fifth anniversary last July. A staple of my early years was the “Peanuts” comic strip. That doesn’t make me unusual—I don’t recall anyone in my circle of family and friends unaware of what Charlie Brown and company were up to on a daily or at least weekly basis. Depending on my mood and what was going on in my... Read more
We didn’t want to be in Memphis, or anywhere in the South for that matter. I clearly remember the evening in the middle of a Milwaukee winter when the phone rang. Jeanne answered, then holding the receiver out to me as if it was a piece of rotting meat said “It’s Sister Ann McKean from Christian Brothers University in Memphis.” As I took the receiver, she whispered “I AM NOT GOING TO MEMPHIS” (Jeanne is very capable of whispering in... Read more
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