This has been a challenging week in class, not because of my students but because of the topics we are studying. On Monday I spent two hours in seminar with thirteen honors students considering Sartre’s play No Exit and Camus’ extended essay The Myth of Sisyphus which begins with the following upbeat observation: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of... Read more
An alternative title for this essay might be “A Comedian Interprets the Parable of the Prodigal Son.” In the most recent “Faith for Normal People” podcast, “the other God-ordained podcast on the Internet” (Bible for Normal People is the first one), comedian Pete Holmes is the guest. I confess I had never heard of the guy and I’m not sure I’m headed to YouTube to find some of his standup. But he’s one of the few comedians I am aware... Read more
Last week I introduced a bunch of honors sophomores to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s distinction between “Cheap grace” and “Costly grace,” the difference between committing verbally to one’s faith while allowing it to affect one’s life only on the surface level (cheap), and embracing the life-changing and completely disruptive things that will happen if one takes one’s faith seriously (costly). I likened the distinction to the difference between light beer and real beer. Light beer smells like and looks like beer, but... Read more
The Gospel reading for last Sunday, the First Sunday of Lent, is the account of Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness from one of the synoptic Gospels. The account du jour was from Mark’s gospel, which–as usual–was brief, to the point, and lacking in some detiails (such as the actual content of the three temptations). The story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is also the centerpiece of one of the greatest passages in all of literature, Fyodor... Read more
On this day after Presidents Day I’m thinking about a specific power that presidents uniquely have–the power to pardon. The former orange president argued both while he was in office and ever since that a president has unlimited power in office and complete immunity from prosecution for anything–even after leaving office. Trump exercised the power to pardon liberally when leaving office; many wondered if he had the power to pardon himself, something he should perhaps have looked into more aggressively... Read more
Tomorrow is President’s Day, which for all college professors means–as do all Monday holidays in the middle of the semester–“catch up day.” It’s the Spring semester’s version of Indigenous Peoples Day. I will be spending most of the day catching up on the grading that never seems to end, particularly since I have this nasty habit of assigning my students a lot of writing assignments. But it’s also a time to think about Presidents as well as social policy and... Read more
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper. I cannot quite make it out. Annie Dillard In my “Apocalypse” seminar today, we will be considering the destruction of Pompeii in 79 CE caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius (we consider all sorts of happy things in this course). The one written report of the event from Pliny the Younger who observed the eruption from the other side of the bay from Pompeii, notes that the eruption... Read more
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent (my least favorite liturgical season). As the calendar would have it, tomorrow is also Valentine’s Day. This is the second time in six years that Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day have fallen on the same day; before 2018, it hadn’t happened since 1945. What follows is a selection from the Lent chapter in For Everything There is a Season: An Outsider’s Journey through the Liturgical Year, one of the two books I finished... Read more
For someone who is a dedicated college basketball fan and a rabid follower of the Providence College Friars, it’s been a long time since I’ve written about sports fanaticism on this blog. Through an interesting confluence of basketball and a new movie over the past week, I’ve learned a couple of things about the nature of forgiveness. Southern New England is a hotbed of college basketball fanaticism, and the Providence College Friars are the biggest game in town in Rhode... Read more
Last Monday’s text in my sophomore Honors seminar, a course that spans literature, history, theology and philosophy from the late 19th century to the present was Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs.Dalloway, chosen by my teaching partner from the English department as an example of postmodernism in literature. Mrs. Dalloway is a creative and post-modern presentation of just another day in between-the-wars London through the eyes, stream of consciousness, and thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway. Clarissa is a fifty-something upper-middle class woman who is... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In