Shakespeare has memorable passages about ghosts that are appropriate for Halloween.
In “Not Like a Dove” Mary Pratt reconceptualizes the Holy Spirit in a number of startling ways. Her goal, according to guest blogger Sue Schmidt, is to bring us closer to Godhead.
The new film “Anonymous” claims that Shakespeare was a fraud. The only fraud is the film itself.
Our students, displaced by mold, are being housed in a cruise ship. A campus production of “As You Like It” may have given administrators the idea.
Posted in Dahl (Roald), Melville (Herman), Porter (Katherine Anne), Shakespeare (William) | Tagged 2000 Leagues under the Sea, As You Like It, Beatles, Education, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Katherine Anne Porter, Moby Dick, Mold, Ship of Fools, St. Mary's College of Maryland, William Shakespeare |
The minds translates the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives, often to the detriment of what really happened. Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park” muses on this phenomenon.
Adam Gopnik argues that Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” is a manifesto for the liberal arts.
Our College has closed down two dorms after a mold attack. Among the many remedies has been an Emily Dickinson poem.
In “The Call,” George Herbert opens himself to God’s love with a confidence not found in many of his poems.
The Oscar-winning film “In a Better World” explores how to respond to the world’s violence in an authentic and uncompromising way.
Sometimes art holds a mirror up to life, sometimes life imitates art. Wednesday’s story of exotic animals on the rampage in Zanesville, Ohio had me thinking we were in the middle of the John Irving novel Letting the Bears Loose. The story, in case you missed it, involved the owner of an exotic animal preserve [...]
New York Jet Darrelle Revis may be single man island who can shut down any receiver who comes near, but ultimately he must acknowledge, like John Donne, that no man is an island.
On Sunday my Jane Austen First Year Seminar students came to my housefor a meal that we took out of the “Jane Austen Cookbook.” The meal took two days to prepare and four people to serve.
May Justus, an Appalachian author who wrote children’s books and poetry, has a great poem about windy weather. Recalling it recently brought back other memories of this remarkable woman.
John O’Donohue’s “Bennacht (Blessing)” tells us that if we live in the world mindfully, the world will sustain us through the dark times.
Judy Grahn sees our Hollywood stars as modern day Helen of Troys and explores their power over us.
The example of Edmund Bertram in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” helps us understand the less-than-ideal choices our leaders sometimes make as they negotiate a compromised world.
In “Mansfield Park” Jane Austen calls out the irresponsible wealthy in ways that the Occupy Wall Street protests would approve.
Nobel laureate Thomas Tranströmer’s poem “After a Death” accurately captures how it feels to lose someone you love.
African American blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates uses Jane Austen’s villainous Fanny Dashwood to penetrate the mindset of American racists.
Wendell Barry’s “Peace of Wild Things” provides a vision that can help counteract what Thomas Merton identifies as the most common form of innate violence: the rush and pressure of modern life.
The 1941 film “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is unsettling by how relevant to our current day economic crisis is its story of America selling its soul.
In a short poem about about Sancho Panza and one of the windmills, Scott Bates describes Don Quixote’s sidekick as common sense reality robbing life of imagination.
A visiting lecture on “Slaves as Loyal Confederates” reminded me of the complex relationships between black and white as they are explored by Twain and Stowe.
In “Blood,” Naomi Shihab Nye grieves the massacres of Lebanese Palestinians in a poem that calls out for us to see each other as individuals and not as racial Others.
As I watched the amazing day of baseball last Wednesday, I found myself thinking (being the literature nerd that I am) that the English novel was invented to do justice to reality when it got this dramatic and complex.
Posted in Defoe (Daniel), Dickens (Charles), Fielding (Henry), Sterne (Lawrence) | Tagged Baseball, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Robinson Crusoe, Sports, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy |
Rashani’s poem captures the miracle of Yom Kippur by describing the unbroken arising out of brokenness.
