This past summer, I got an email from my past writing professor Jamin Rowan explaining that he would be co-teaching an Honors Unexpected Connections course titled “The Art of Transformative Storytelling,” and he asked if I’d be willing to be a TA. Storytelling has been a passion of mine since I was little, and I …
Waxing Poetic about Wax and Other Loves
I’m a fan of Peter Paul Rubens: his high drama, the fleshy rose of female cheeks and statuesque curves, vermilion fabrics and wine-colored tassels dripping from elaborate couches and mantles. I once spent a happy afternoon at the National Gallery in London, losing my cool and track of time amidst sensual lines and mythologic women. …
“Rally Round the Standard of the Cross”
In his opening devotional this fall, President Worthen expressed concern that at BYU “our sense of community has lessened, and our sense of loneliness and isolation has increased.” The solution he proposed to our waning sense of belonging is to knit our hearts together in a community that gives more weight to what we have …
Shimmering Scalarities: Dr. Brian Roberts on Deep Time, Archipelagic Thinking, and Borderwaters
“Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.”[1] In Dr. Brian Russell Roberts’s latest book, Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America, out with Duke University Press in May of this year, he immerses …
Deviating Beauty in Stones, Plants, and Words
As long as I have been a student at BYU, I have always adored the home of the Humanities: the Joseph Fielding Smith Building (JFSB). On bright, sunny days, I often meander into the Mary Lou Fulton Plaza and idle away several peaceful moments sitting next to the towering broken rocks. I listen to the …
Professor Elliott D. Wise on Affective Piety, Ekphrastic Mysticism, and Dramatic Teaching
Affect, verb: (1) have an effect upon; make a difference to. (2) touch the feelings of (someone); move emotionally. Elliott D. Wise, assistant professor of Art History in the Comparative Arts and Letters department, confesses that he teaches in a rather emotional style—dramatic, even—in part to keep people awake in the dim light of an …
On Wobbling Moons and Disciplines
I’m a sucker for astronomical clickbait. “The Moon is Wobbling!” got me. My world tilted on its axis when I discovered the rock that existed peripherally at the foggy edges of perception is a bit like a staggering drunk on his way home from the pub: reliably unstable on his feet, creating mild annoyance in …