During my sabbatical semester over a decade ago at an ecumenial institute on the campus of a Benedictine university, I participated in morning, noon, and evening prayer almost every day with the monks at the large Benedictine abbey on campus. In the four months of my sabbatical we read the entire cycle of the Psalms two or three times. One of my favorites became Psalm 148, which tells us that [The Lord] executes justice for the oppressed [and] gives food... Read more
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace. Baruch Spinoza My teaching colleagues and I were happy to learn during the spring semester last year that Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus had been banned by Tennessee’s McMinn County school board from its curriculum. Serialized from 1980-91, Maus won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for literature. When choosing the texts for our team-taught course, an interdisciplinary exploration of the twentieth century through literature, history, philosophy,... Read more
Truth isn’t sympathetic to our need for certainty or stability. Jared Enns, “The Bible for Normal People” There is a self-described atheist who regularly comments on this blog, usually to express his strong disagreement with suggestions that a conception of God might be something more than a myth or fairy tale. His most recent comment was in response to an essay I posted around Christmas titled “Why the Details of Jesus’ Birth Don’t Matter.” He observed that So, at least... Read more
One of the matters I am paying close attention to this semester, as I prepare for a sabbatical semester in the fall and my book project on the teaching life, is the ways in which the texts I am teaching have shaped me as both a college professor and a person. One of the courses I am teaching this semester is the fourth of a four-semester sequence required of all frewhmen and sophomores at my college as the heart of... Read more
In his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson tells us that one of the many fascinating things about Leonardo is that he did not fit the model of a solitary and tortured genius. Rather, Leonardo was an extroverted “people person” who loved bouncing ideas off other creative people, the sorts of folks he surrounded himself with in his studio and travelling entourage. Commenting on this, Isaacson writes that Unlike Michelangelo and some other anguished artists, Leonardo enjoyed being surrounded... Read more
I have a recently retired good friend and colleague in the philosophy department who has twin daughters. A number of years ago, during the summer between his daughters’ junior and senior years in high school, my friend and his family visited seventeen different college campuses. The young ladies in question, although twins, could not be more different in appearance or personality. Daughter #1, whose interests were predominantly focused on science, favored Dartmouth College but was also very interested in the... Read more
I have heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you. The Book of Job In the “Faith and Doubt” colloquium that I am team-teaching this semester, the first seminar text was the Book of Job from the Jewish scriptures. Among other things, we talked about Job’s reaction to what God has to say about the unfairness of Job’s suffering after many chapters of silence from the Divine end of things. Job, described by God to Satan... Read more
Five years ago, my college celebrated its centennial. For Jeanne and me, the highlight of a series of events scheduled to mark the anniversary was a lecture by Doris Kearns Goodwin. We arrived early enough to sit in the second row, twenty feet or so from the podium, and along with a packed house were held spellbound for over an hour as our favorite historian used examples from the lives of Presidents about whom she has written best sellers—LBJ, FDR,... Read more
This coming Sunday’s gospel reading is the Beatitudes from Matthew, the opening lines from the Sermon on the Mount. It is a scene so familiar in our imaginations that it has become iconic. In films, on television, the subject of countless artistic renditions, we are transported back two thousand years. It is a beautiful, cloudless day. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have gathered in the countryside from miles around; some have walked for hours. The second season of The Chosen... Read more
Therefore with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12 In his collection of essays Breakfast at the Victory, James Carse writes about the spiritual lessons he learned when the water at his family’s rural New England cabin started tasting funny one summer. It turned out that the wooden cover over the cabin’s well had collapsed under the weight of a deer or a bear, and was polluting the water that fed the well. Carse’s essay explores, with some... Read more
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