Dear Mom

Dear Mom~ The other day I read an article in the news about parents in Tennessee and elsewhere rallying to have books removed from their teens’ school libraries—books that reference race, sexuality, or the Holocaust in ways that made them (the parents) uncomfortable. I wondered how those kids felt, watching their parents on social media …

“Quick to Observe”: Or, Desultory Thoughts on Seeing and Learning

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s much-loved “Pied Beauty” (a “curtal sonnet” composed in 1877) fits the season, as spring begins to arrest our attention: GLORY be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, …

“Not Even the Alphabet or the Multiplication Tables …”

The week before last, the Humanities Center held a discussion motivated by the never-ending “crisis in the humanities” and centered on how three colleagues have seen their fields, students, and jobs evolve over the past decade or two. These colleagues – Daryl Lee (French and Italian), Kristin Matthews (English), and Rex Nielson (Spanish and Portuguese) …

Roots and Stems, Flowers and Graves

On the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the news outlet Ukraine World shared a video on Twitter showing a Ukrainian woman in Henychesk giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers. [1] She says, “Take these seeds and put them in your pockets so that at least sunflowers [the Ukrainian national flower] will grow where …