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This past summer, I went on a study abroad trip to Portugal. Prior to my travels, I had very limited knowledge of the country. I could not recite a list of its famous people, nor could I produce the names of its top tourist attractions. I couldn’t talk about its food, its citizens or its …

Mary Clark Moschella of Yale Divinity School recently visited campus for a series of events on joy and pastoral care. As a postlude to her visit, I want to reflect briefly on joy as one theological foundation for an understanding of human dignity.[1] Moschella links these concepts when she offers a pastoral theological description in …

One of the mandatory jobs of a new graduate student is to be extremely frolicsome among research interests and subdisciplines—to haphazardly flit among the flowers of knowledge in one’s department or program, relishing the opportunity to taste the nectar of as many buds as possible. Such a metaphor was also invoked by the Renaissance-era humanist …

I’ve been reading Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. It is fantastic. I commend it to all of you. It has led me to transform many of my work habits. At the same time, I found myself laughing and then groaning when my very own academic discipline and …

Patterns crawl up the walls of the Blue Mosque. Painted vines spring from ceramic tiles in endless loops, flowers blooming between them. Intricate spirals originate at the bottom of the wall and repeat over and over until they reach the arching dome high above, where blue, red, and gold swirl together in stunning symmetry. A …

Hi, I’m Bobbe May, and I’m just hitting my year mark of being (and loving my work as) the Associate Director of the BYU Humanities Center. My academic training is not in the humanities, but from day one something about this job just felt right. As I have reflected on why this could be, my …

I’ve been listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s biography by Robert D. Richardson, subtitled: “The Mind on Fire.” Richardson wrote an intellectual biography on Henry Thoreau as well, called: “A Life of the Mind.” Perhaps because those phrases were foremost in my subconscious—resonating with me, exciting me, and providing motivation during the past year as I’ve …

Few concepts in academia carry as much negative weight as the notion of the academic silo. Indeed, would any professor welcome the suggestion or even implication that they work in an academic silo? At the most recent meeting of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), this phrase seemed to be on the tip …

It was BYU’s university conference week in late August 2011, and I was feeling a little nostalgic. And anxious. I was at the college meeting for faculty for what I anticipated was the last time. My family had returned a couple months earlier from Aberdeen, Scotland – the second of our half-yearly stints where I …