From confusion and dispersing to community and understanding. It’s a great story! Read more
From confusion and dispersing to community and understanding. It’s a great story! Read more
It’s Ascension Sunday tomorrow, and I’m giving the sermon! Read more
A disturbingly common mishap in recent Summer Olympic games has been the failure of U.S. track and field relay teams. Individually, these teams almost always are made up of the best runners, top to bottom, of any nation’s relay contingent. Best times, best individual win-loss records. But great individuals do not a successful relay team make. In a relay race, each runner is required not only to run her or his lap as swiftly as possible, but also to hand... Read more
Today is a day for finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Read more
Although the spring semester ended less than a week ago, I have been planning for my fall courses for several weeks now. Such is the life of a teacher—we often live at least six months in advance of the date on the calendar. My teammate in the freshman first semester segment of the four-semester interdisciplinary program I direct and have taught in for years and I have already made our book order with wonderful texts ranging from Aeschylus to Boethius... Read more
Continuing with Monday’s theme of clashing cultures, today I’m wondering what to do about those people who do not fit into my inner circle. Expand the circle . . .? Read more
I got involved briefly in a Facebook debate the other day over whether Jane Austen’s novels have any redeeming value—I think they do. Someone with an opposite opinion quoted the following from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit or knowledge of the world.... Read more
I have often said that the mark of a good class is one in which I learn as much as the students do. At the end of the semester, it is a good time to think back over the many unexpected truths I have learned from my students this semester. Since my colleagues and I frequently compare notes on this topic, I have also included in the selection below various items that I learned second-hand from students not in my... Read more
About a year ago, a former student of mine working toward her PhD in philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, sent out a call through Facebook for anyone interested in talking on the radio show she produces about certainty as a moral problem. I volunteered, she interviewed me by phone for an hour, and the edited version of my comments was part of this week’s program on her show, “Pioneer Radio,” heard bi-weekly on CFRU, 93.3 FM in... Read more
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