Isaac Richards

I’m just out to find / the better part of me. —Five for Fighting, “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” I have an existential crisis about once a week. Upon writing that sentence, I’m realizing I don’t know precisely what an existential crisis is—that’s just what my wife and I call these episodes. Fortunately, the initial Google …

Four hard, but incredible and rewarding years of college all amounted to this moment for me. This semester I took on the responsibility of student teaching at a local high school, the final step in my preparation for my university diploma and teaching licensure. Over the past couple of months, I had the opportunity to …

I can’t remember my great grandmother. She died just before I turned five, and she’d been suffering from dementia long enough that she likely wouldn’t have known my face or name. If, in some hypothetical world, we were to pass each other on the street, I am unsure if I would even recognize her. More …

We live in a world that abhors discomfort. Watch 30 minutes of television and you will see numerous ads testifying that product X will make your life better because it will be easier. There’s an app for everything and all promise to make you healthy, wealthy, and wise without having to exert yourself or experience …

The world of ancient Christianity can be daunting, complex, and easily misunderstood. In fact, unless you hold multiple PhDs in archaeology, art history, ancient near eastern studies, patristics, classics, and theology—not to mention the ability to read Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac—then you may be at a loss for where to even begin learning about …

Last November, OpenAI, a Bay Area research company specializing in artificial intelligence, introduced the universe to a program called ChatGPT-3. Within five days, one million people had jumped on the program to play around with it.  For reference, it took Facebook ten months to reach one million users and Netflix three and a half years. …

When editors of a book on the history of the Mexican novel asked me to contribute an essay on the longest books written during the 20th century, I accepted. There was no reason not to, and I was the right guy for the job. My work in historical fiction and high modernist fiction in Spanish …

There I was, a rhetorician reading poetry. I found this amusing given the disciplinary history of rhetoric and poetry. Aristotle wrote a treatise called The Rhetoric and another called The Poetics because those were separate fields for him. However, the two exist between the same covers on my shelf as The Rhetoric and the Poetics …

January has returned, trailing clouds of new year’s resolutions. My return to campus coincides with a return to the MLA Convention for the first time in more than a decade. I know that for many in the college, the yearly MLA gathering signals an important temporal point on the academic calendar while providing valuable professional …