Three weeks ago, I posted an essay that described a new course called “Faith and Doubt” that I will be teaching next spring with a Dominican priest colleague and friend from the Political Science department. I’m Faith and He’s Doubt In the interest of moving the ball forward, we are meeting each week for lunch to discuss and plan. One of my proposed texts is The Time of the Angels, one of Iris Murdoch’s many thought-provoking and disturbing novels from the... Read more
Autumn officially begins this week, which is wonderful news. Autumn is by far my favorite season of the year. I have lived in New England for roughly 45 of my 65 years, so I know something about the wonders of the fall. I grew up in northern Vermont, surrounded by spectacular foliage colors every late September and crisp, jacket-wearing sunny days in October. Or so I remember it—given that Vermont reportedly has more cloudy days per year than any other... Read more
In the interdisciplinary Honors course that I am team-teaching in this semester, we are smack in the middle of the 18th century. And that, among other things, means satire. I love satire and frequently use it in class to great effect, an effect heightened by the fact that the average nineteen-year-old can’t tell the difference between satire, irony, and a spreadsheet (even when they are in the Honors program). The texts for our seminars on Monday include Jonathan Swift’s “A... Read more
A continuing theme of my various classes over the first three weeks of the semester has, not surprisingly, been the cognitive dissonance surrounding just about everything currently in this country. A seminar with eleven honors students on John Locke’s political thought included speculation about what Locke might want to say to anti-vaxxers, those who believe without evidence that the November 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the general attitude that if my side doesn’t win something nefarious and corrupt must... Read more
It is the happy life that asks more of us than we realize we have and then surprises us by enabling it in us. Joan Chittister Is there any human state or condition more elusive, or more difficult to define, than happiness? Aristotle, my top candidate for the greatest philosopher in the Western tradition, famously wrote that every human being above all wants to be happy—they just disagree about the definition of the term. As our culture generally defines happiness, it... Read more
As always, this past summer was a season of eclectic reading. I am team-teaching a course that I have not taught in a dozen years, so our syllabus several books that I’ve never read (yes, there are such things). One of them is Clint Smith’s new book How the Word Is Passed, whose subtitle is “A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” The historical bookends of our course are roughly the Enlightenment and the beginning of the twentieth... Read more
Everyone beyond a certain age can remember clearly what they were doing twenty years ago when they heard the news. I was in my college’s main cafeteria getting coffee and noticed something weird happening on the Today Show broadcast on a television hanging from the ceiling in the corner. At that point all they knew was that one of the Twin Towers was on fire, apparently because an airplane had crashed into it. I had scheduled office hours that morning, so I... Read more
We all know that when life hands you a lemon that you should make lemonade. But what should you do when the lemons come in multiples and so quickly that there isn’t time to look for the juicer? August was that sort of month for Jeanne and me, as we dealt in quick succession with the death of her brother and the loss of our dachshund Winnie on the same day, then the hospitalization of our daughter-in-law followed by the... Read more
There are a couple of sayings attributed to Jesus that Christians often use when attempting to show that following Jesus and a commitment to capitalism are compatible with each other–I’ve encountered each of them over the past few days. In a Facebook thread, a person noted that since Jesus said that “God helps those who helps themselves,” clearly he would endorse the capitalist work ethic of competition and self-promotion. Then yesterday on Twitter someone quoted Jesus as saying that “If... Read more
My first teaching position was at a small university in Memphis. My department was the “Department of Religion and Philosophy,” housing four theologians and two philosophers. I taught most of the philosophy courses (five classes per semester—that’s a lot, in case you’re wondering); the other philosopher on staff had a reduced teaching load because he was also the Dean of the School of Humanities. Peter was also the most awkwardly, painfully introverted, and shy adult human being I have ever... Read more
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