The Difference Between Pardoning and Forgiveness

Last updated on: February 16, 2024 at 2:52 pm By Vance Morgan

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

Who Would Jesus Bomb? A President’s Day Reflection

Last updated on: February 16, 2024 at 12:42 pm By Vance Morgan

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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

A Terrible Beauty

Last updated on: February 14, 2024 at 3:06 pm By Vance Morgan

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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

Lent and Valentine’s Day

Last updated on: February 15, 2024 at 10:25 pm By Vance Morgan

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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

Basketball and Forgiveness

Last updated on: February 11, 2024 at 2:31 pm By Vance Morgan

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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

Doing Good for the Sake of Goodness

Last updated on: February 7, 2024 at 11:27 am By Vance Morgan

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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

Who Am I? How to Build a Person

Last updated on: February 3, 2024 at 1:18 pm By Vance Morgan

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In one of the essays assigned for my honors colloquium on Michel de Montaigne this past week, Montaigne writes in some detail about his faulty memory. There is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognize almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient . . . It is not unreasonably said that anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory... Read more

Can We Trust Each Other? A Reflection on Human Nature

Last updated on: February 4, 2024 at 12:37 pm By Vance Morgan

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The other day upon returning from her early morning visit to the gym, the first thing Jeanne said was “I was listening to an episode of ‘Throughline’ on the radio that you will love! It’s all about the problem of evil—they were just starting to talk about Hobbes when I got home!” Not many people’s spouses get excited about conversations that focus on 17th century English philosophers, but she knows me well. We listened to the podcast together later the... Read more

Is Religion a Virus?

Last updated on: January 30, 2024 at 3:26 pm By Vance Morgan

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The last time I was a member of a search committee for a new tenure track faculty member in my department, I found the response to the college’s mission statement (required of all semifinalist candidates) to be particularly interesting. The candidate wrote that “A dear friend and colleague with whom I shared an office for many years once confided in me that he could hardly believe that I was really religious, for I seemed like such a reasonable man. ‘And... Read more

What Sort of Bubble Do You Live In?

Last updated on: January 29, 2024 at 10:03 pm By Vance Morgan

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In my last post I wrote about being comfortable in my own skin as an introvert. I was reminded while writing that being comfortable in my own skin is a relatively new phenomenon in my life. I remember clearly when while away from home on sabbatical fifteen years days ago Jeanne told me during our daily phone call about a conversation with a mutual close friend that she had on the phone a couple of days earlier. “How is Vance... Read more