March 2021

I have always hated making my bed. It’s a funny thing to hate, because making a bed really isn’t a particularly terrible task. When you make a bed, you just shake out and smooth your sheets and your blanket. Pretty simple. You don’t have to get your hands dirty, you don’t have to exert much …

“My work in teaching and studying feminist art history,” says Heather Belnap, associate professor of art history in the department of Comparative Arts and Letters, “is about the recovery of lost voices and recognizing the historic contributions of women.” But in addition to conventional scholarly projects, publications and academic endeavors, Professor Belnap adds that her …

Language is uniquely human I imagine most definitions of “the humanities” include something about the study of human expression and, to a lesser extent, human interaction. Perhaps the most quintessentially human activity that we do is to communicate with others in one or more human languages. Of course, we are not the only species that …

Last March brought a cardiac arrest to the heart of our collective life, and April became the stutter-step ba-bum, ba-bum of life trying to soldier on. Like everyone else, I retreated to my apartment after a hasty run to the grocery store. There, the Twinkies were fully stocked, but the canned garbanzo beans were gone. …

“I am learning Russian . . . Я учусь русскому.” Though this simple sentence encapsulates nearly all the mental and emotional activity I exerted during my nine-week stint in the Provo Missionary Training Center, I struggled, ironically, to both understand and execute the correct grammar construction of the sentence itself. Part of my struggle lay …