Gaps and Gifts
Originally Published 1999 “The Artist, the thinker, the hero, the saint —who are they, finally, but the finite self radicalized and intensified? . . . The difference between [them] and the rest of us . . . is a willingness to undergo the journey of…
Academic Animals: Making Nonhuman Creatures Matter in Universities
Originally published in 2005 For two weeks of March, 2000, in the vast jungle along Mexico’s southern border with Belize, I joined a team of biologists and hounds in chasing and capturing a wild jaguar. I was in Mexico as a Fulbright Scholar. It took…
Gendered Tongues: Issues of Gender in the Foreign Language Classroom
Originally Published 1996 Introduction Like other disciplines such as English and Sociology, Foreign Languages also have a history in the United States which is linked to the changing values of society as a whole. The discipline of foreign language teaching has evolved over the last…
Introduction
Spring, 2022 This issue marks an important transition for the Division of Humanities. As of this summer, the Humanities programs —English, Languages & Literatures, the Language Resource Center, the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the Parkland Literacy Center, Philosophy, and Religion— will merge…
The Pragmatism of the Liberal Arts
Originally published in 1999 My lifelong commitment to the liberal arts took root in the fourth grade, when I met my classmate and dear life-long friend Sally. During that entire year, Sally rode her bike to my house, and after school, we both rode our…
Locating Humanities in the 21st Century
Originally published in 2016 As scholars of the Humanities in the 21st century we find ourselves working in unusual settings. Places of faith and worship, educational contexts like high schools and public libraries, in newspapers, in comment forums, on radio shows, our “workplaces” often do…
The Contemplation of the Humanities
Originally published in 2016 But, for the time being, here we all are, Back in the moderate Aristotelian city Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience, And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it. It…
Indigenizing the Academy
Originally published in 2014 One of the things that studying Indigenous stories and situations has shown me is that knowledge isn’t neutral. Our systems of knowledge grow out of our ways of being in the world and are all culturally-specific—that is, they are all created…
Ebenezer Scrooge, Martin Luther, and the Power of the Past and of Language
Originally published in 2012 There’s something strange that goes on with texts, readers, writers, and time. I mean, look at you: there you are, reading this now, in the spring of 2012. And here I am, in your past, and it’s not even (technically) winter…
Sustainability in Monastic Communities
Originally published in 2021 Dr. Samuel Torvend spent his sabbatical during the 2019-20 school year researching environmental consciousness and sustainability in early medieval monastic communities. Early medieval monasteries were built to last, he emphasizes. “When these monastic communities were established, they did not think they…