Locker 5NW11, Harold B. Lee Library, 40°14’55.6” N, 111°38’58.4” W The existence of rentable lockers, scattered across various BYU campus buildings, flies under the radar of many students. Well, at least it did for me. The particular lockers pictured here [i] stand along the back wall of the Harold B. Lee library’s fifth floor, beige rectangles …
In Praise of Mobility
This past year, my experience with COVID has taught me the importance of mobility. I realize I had taken for granted going out and getting around, and having access to work, stores, and face-to-face church services. Perhaps like me, you only discovered this when your ability to leave home, go to school or work, go …
Making Your Bed, Living Your Life
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 …
Professor Heather Belnap on Public Advocacy for Women in the Arts and Student Mentorship
“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 …
Humans Speak, Dolphins Don’t
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 …
Caverns Deep
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. …
The Grammar of Learning
“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 …
Poetry & Physical Science: Becoming a Renaissance Man
During this semester, my last as an undergraduate at BYU, I’ve been furiously finishing up my Honors thesis, working towards writing a capstone English paper, and preparing for life after graduation. I’ve also been reading pages of physical science and attending Zoom lectures with a bunch of wide-eyed, mostly freshman, students. Although the lectures are …
Keep Wading in the Waters
February is Black History Month and I wish to honor it here by sharing some of my thoughts, especially my conviction that racial justice needs to become a spiritual compulsion as well as a social responsibility for each one of us. We discuss issues of race in most of my classes. Italian 361 (Italian Culture …
The Silent Battle and the Self
While the deadly pandemic of COVID-19 forced everyone into their homes for protection, another devastating illness also rapidly spread: depression. Comparing pre-pandemic times to current day, depression rates jumped from 1 in 10 people to 1 in 3.[i] Most likely all of us know people struggling with depression, whether we know about it or not. …