Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
This poem was written by Marie Hua, winner of the 2026 Artistic Narrative section in the 2026 Humanities Center Tell Your Story Contest. Tonight, my Nǎinai makes wontons: ground pork bok choy xiāmǐ thumbs up! chop to mix, hǎo hǎo hǎo… We wrap them like small talk; like how on the way to buy …
This essay was written by Paige Winegar Fetzer, winner of the Creative Nonfiction section of the 2026 Humanities Center Tell Your Story Contest. Most of what I know about God has arrived sideways—caught like dust motes illuminated in a warm slant of light. The summer before I started graduate school, the sun slipped through …
This essay was written by Sawyer Wood, BYU Humanities Center intern and student fellow. A few months ago, Wicked: For Good was released in theaters. As the concluding adaptation of one of Broadway’s longest-running musicals, it stood among the year’s most anticipated films, and seemed to be something the whole world was talking about. When …
This post was written by Cherice Montgomery, a Humanities Center faculty fellow. Seasons of Creativity My research focuses on the nature and design of compelling learning experiences. I am especially interested in creating immersive learning environments that put language learners into flow, or a state of such deep attention and personal enjoyment that both …
Last month on this blog, I remarked on the cognitively dissonant revelations that sometimes break into our daily quotidian lives regarding collective, global, or cosmic concerns. I described in that post how some scholars view our efforts to manage this dissonance through personal meaning absolutely absurd, while others offer ways of countering it through personal …
This post was written by Kathryn Charles, the current Humanities Center Intern. My uncle died the week before my wedding. It was one of my first close encounters with death, and so my grief, although real, was also strange and unexpected. In the days after his death, I found myself spontaneously weeping over cheese …
During the summer of 2012, shortly after Professor David Laraway had begun his doctoral coursework in Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, he came across popular press reports featuring a botched attempt to restore a religious fresco in Spain. A well-meaning parishioner, Cecilia Giménez, had attempted to restore the painting in a …
This post was written by Stephen Tuttle, a BYU Humanities Center faculty fellow. Recently, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about novelty. This is partly because I teach creative writing, and novelty is a central element in most definitions of creativity. Morris Stein’s definition goes like this: “The creative work is a novel work …
Never in my life have I been so joyous to see the return of a CGI lizard selling car insurance or numerous ads selling unhealthy carbonated and caffeinated beverages than on Wednesday, November 7th2018 after the mid-term elections. The onslaught of ads for and against candidates seemed particularly onerous this year both online and on …
This post was written by Ryan Hill, Assistant Academic Director of the BYU Humanities Center. A few months ago, as I listened to a song by Trueno, one of my favorite musicians, I was struck by the lyrics of one of the verses. In his song, “Sangría,” released in 2019, the young Argentine hip-hop/rap …