Tag: education

Rational ideas create hell on earth. Just ask a kulak. Or just ask the lettuce plants in my garden.

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence.

Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts.

Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but especially scholars of the humanities–to think differently about their life.

I must say that I did not want to write this review. I walked into the theatre with high hopes for Mr. Garland’s Civil War. I was hoping it would sober people to the actual horrors that a modern a civil war would entail.

I do not know where the future will take us. I’m not going to try and escape the risks in modern society, but I’m also not going to ignore them. I’m going to be right here, in the thick of it, and that’s where I want to be.

To fight a culture war justly is to be confident that your arguments have a reasonable chance of success; but this means that to fight justly is not only about carefully crafting arguments but also about sensitively observing the context in which you will deploy them.

If we fail to recognize friendship for what it is, and for the role it plays in the maturation process of children and young adults, we lose out on a world that is diverse in the relationships it values

If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives and reads in place, bringing my reading and my other work in the world closer together in the most literal, physical sense. For encouragement in my pursuit of that home field, I have Tiffany Eberle Kriner to thank.

In a world in which there are so many problems to solve, solitude plays an important role in helping us remember that life consists of more than finding and righting wrongs. Time spent resting and recharging has moral value too.