Amanda Patchin
Amanda Patchin is a freelance writer and education consultant from Boise, Idaho. She reads a bit more than average and loves nothing more than conversation about a good book. Her love of the written word occasionally produces a poem or an article and her love of food often produces dinner.
Articles by Amanda Patchin
The Light Eaters
Plant biology seems to be revolutionizing our understanding of what a plant is and can be. This is a gift that may help us grow in wisdom, in reverence, and…
Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Review
There ought not be unnecessary opposition between Indigenous and Christian perspectives. The creative work of caring for our ecology is hard enough; let us not also misunderstand one another.
The Timeless Way of Building: A Review
Why is it that we can all say that this building works, that this room is just right, that this town is good and pleasing? Why is it that we…
Good Conversation and the Talking Cure: A Review
One cannot really have a book about conversation alone. Conversation is so much a fruit of individual persons and their relationship to one another, that a book about that fruit…
Who Loves Academic Discourse? A Review of Rita Felski’s Hooked
Attunement, attachment, engagement, and identification are all absolutely necessary for properly considering artworks of all kinds. However, I struggle to identify the application of Felski's argument. Perhaps it is because,…
Substitution and Exchange
If such substitution and exchange were genuinely possible, would we agree with Lewis that no gift was more gladly given? Would we too readily assume we could bear another’s burden…
Life and Death in the Forest: A Review of Finding the Mother Tree
Simard concludes that all of the natural world is interconnected and her conclusion is particularly poignant as she points out that the hard-won insight of her decades of research is…
A Jane Austen January
The enduring value of adding Jane Austen to my disciplines was not beholden to my expectation of enjoyment from a happy wedding nor was it dependent on my recognition that…
The Art of Living an Examined Life
If human beings flourish from their inner core rather than in the realm of impact and results, then the inner work of learning is fundamental to human happiness, as far…
Better to Have Loved and Lost: A Review of Peter Wohlleben’s The Inner Life of Animals
If I can value the inner lives and the outer well-being of animals and plants and rocks and stars, because I can see the inherent beauty and goodness that something…
Consider the Forest: A Review of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees
If a human timescale—privileging our experience and our hopes—is insufficient to understand the forest, then maybe we will be provoked to reconsider both the human and forestal timescale.
An Artistic Ecosystem: A Review of Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care
If truth, beauty, and goodness are truly and mystically related, beauty really is dangerous—but only to evil. Reading Culture Care, and contemplating Makoto Fujimura’s art, I can believe it.