Public Humanities

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 …

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. …

“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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

I’ve been thinking a lot about America lately. Obviously, this line of contemplation may not strike anyone as particularly surprising given the many instances of national upheaval (is that too mild a word?) we’ve all been living through. Events such as the siege on the Capitol, a historically contentious election, economic distress, the global plague, …

I’m going to interweave about four stories here. Let me begin with one of which I’m not terribly proud. I went on the job market the fall of 1999. It was a shockingly good year in my field, with a number of great jobs listed, and I was in a surprisingly strong position, with a …

By the early years of the twentieth century, China had suffered unduly at the hands of European, American, and Japanese colonialism. The Chinese citizenry had been deeply dissatisfied with the way the Qing dynasty—itself a foreign dynasty ruled by Manchus—had failed to protect China from the encroachment of increasing numbers of foreign powers. By the …

As I start the year 2021, I think back on my almost twenty-five and a half years of life and of being born into a time of increasing calls for awareness, equity, and justice for human beings, regardless of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc. I think about hard conversations, different realities that various groups of …