Starting thise week I am the up front person in both of my team-taught courses for the next two or three weeks. The texts will be from the three 20th century figures who have been most influential on me both professionally and personally: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch. One of the the things I most appreciate about the opportunity to focus on these thinkers in the same course is that it gives me the opportunity to trace connections... Read more
Man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue The most recent edition of The New Yorker—the one with my birthday (March 6, 2023) and Ron DeSantis (ugh!) on the cover—includes a several-thousand-word essay titled “The End of the English Major,” followed by the subtitle “Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?” Although I’m glad I read it, it does... Read more
Albert Camus’ classic extended essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” begins as follows: 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 philosophy. This essay, along with Sartre’s play “No Exit,” was the assigned text in my Honors seminar last week. The conversation was excellent and memorable, addressing several of the matters that I’ll be exploring in this post. If you got... Read more
After spending six and a half decades in the middle of this faith thing, one would think that I might have made some definitive conclusions about faith and real life by now. After all, that’s what the decade of this blog’s existence has been about. But I am continually reminded that any attempts to “figure faith out,” by me or anyone else, are doomed to failure. “Doomed” not because faith can’t be figured out. “Doomed” because, as we philosophers might... Read more
Tomorrow is my birthday. You get one guess for how old I’ll be, with these two clues to help you. It is a prime number and if I live to be 100, tomorrow I will have lived exactly 2/3 of my life. I doubt I’ll live to be 100, but I did have a great-grandmother who lived to be 98, so you never know. When I look in the mirror, I definitely look my age. I look my age so... Read more
This coming Sunday’s gospel gets us back to the basics. Sports fans old enough to remember the 70s and 80s will recall that a regular occurrence at baseball or football games either in person or on television was, when the camera panned the stands, to see a person—often wearing a colorful fright wig—holding up a large homemade poster board sign with a cryptic reference that made sense only for initiates: John 3:16. I often imagined the confusion that many might... Read more
Almost three decades ago when I was a new, junior, untenured faculty member at my college, my classes were observed at least two or three times per semester by one or more members of my “peer review committee.” One’s peer review committee, appointed by the department chair, consists of three tenured faculty colleagues who, after observing what you are up to in the classroom, meet with you at the end of the semester, individually or ganging up on you, to... Read more
Today is the first Sunday of Lent; the gospel reading is Matthew’s account of Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness. This story happens also to be the centerpiece of one of the great passages in all of literature, Dostoevsky’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor story is on our “Faith and Doubt” syllabus next week. What if, the Inquisitor asks, Jesus had succumbed to one of the temptations? Wouldn’t things have been... Read more
This is the third day of Lent. Are you one of those people who give something up for Lent? I’m not–I’ve written a number of times around this time of year about why I think that at its root Lent might be a bad idea, simply because anyone can give up anything for 40 days. Certainly the challenge of following Jesus demands more than that. Beauty for Ashes, or Why Lent is a Bad Idea But if you did give something... Read more
One Wednesday last winter, the student in front of me in line at the little on campus coffee shop in the building next to mine plopped what looked like a pre-packaged chicken Caesar salad on the counter. While fumbling for her card to pay, the cashier said “that isn’t chicken, you know. It’s tofu.” “WHAT?” the student cried. “It’s Ash Wednesday. We aren’t allowed to serve meat on Ash Wednesday or Fridays during Lent.” The exasperated student left her no-longer-wanted... Read more
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