Elizabeth Stice is an Associate Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she's not teaching class, she enjoys reading, running, and spending time with her dog.
Slacker portrays a city and a scene that are delightfully different and offbeat, and the best kinds of places for many emerging creatives today are that way, too. You don’t have to leave the state or run off to the biggest city to do something big: there is a real beauty and opportunity in the less-sung places.
When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they are pursuing, in college and in life.
2020 has certainly had real trials and tribulations, but our approach to it is also reflective of a culture in which everything disliked has long been “the worst.”
If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts.
In television and movies, heroes often push away the ones they love, because relationships can be obstacles or endangering for one or both parties. But what if love is not a liability, but a force greater than gravity?
Students may return to universities that post a philosophy statement but have no philosophy department. Yet as we look at our country, divided over history and by economics, home to scientific innovation and scientific ignorance, education is both more needed and more endangered than ever.
Being wealthy doesn’t make Chouinard a better representative of the values that he shares with Berry, but recognizing that Berry is not alone and that these values can be brought into the wider world, if imperfectly, makes their embrace of limits and simplicity more compelling and their approach to life seem more possible for others.
