Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
The following post was written by Brian Russell Roberts, a Faculty Fellow at the Center. 14 September 2015 In April 2014, one of the BYU Humanities Center’s research groups hosted Yale English professor Wai Chee Dimock. During Professor Dimock’s visit to campus, she graciously sat down for an interview with our Humanities Center Director, Matt …
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 …
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 …
This essay was written by Justin F. White, a BYU Humanities Center faculty fellow. In “A Theory of Jerks,” Eric Schwitzgebel describes the jerk as someone who “culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with rather than as moral and …