Public Humanities

During Halloween last year, I decided to dress to the nines. With the help of a friend, I donned a blue cardigan, a red cape, a few dyed cloth strips, and a pocket-watch-necklace in order to become Marvel’s Doctor Strange. (For those who know me, there was really no better option, and I’m discovering that it’s hard …

On May 2, 2018, my view of life and my role within it was transformed when I received a phone call from the emergency room at Utah Valley Hospital. My 14-year old daughter had been hit by a car. The distracted driver had failed to notice her in the crosswalk. Though he only clipped her …

While visiting my longtime friend and former roommate Ella1 at her home in Folsom, California this past summer, her family graciously took me along with them to visit the nearby Muir Woods National Monument. Ella and I were catching a redeye out of San Francisco that night, but had quite a bit of time to …

Earlier this week, on Constitution Day, BYU Law School issued a press release publicly launching the Law & Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform1. The site will house several large bodies of text compiled to cover the linguistic range of the constitutional record, and is open and available to any user, be it linguist, lawyer, or laymen. …

Last week, I was able to experience Rick Shaefer’s Refugee Trilogy, an exhibit at the BYU Museum of Art.1 Three immense triptychs formed the walls of the one-room exhibit, each symbolizing a different form of refugee travel: “Land Crossing,” “Sea Crossing,” and “Border Crossing.” Although all three pieces were moving (especially when considered and felt …

This is the third installment of a three-part series on spiritual exercises in humanistic registers. The impetus for this series derives from my interest in the nature, meanings, and forms of spiritual experience in secular as well as religious contexts. As one aspect of that wider interest, I’ve been struck by a particular appeal to …

In 1992, the American (immigrant) poet Denise Levertov received a frightening medical report: she had contracted lymphoma. Localized and not—yet—life-threatening, the illness prompted in Levertov a desire for a more vivid spiritual awakening. Having converted to non-denominational Christianity during the mid-1980s, then to Catholicism in 1989, she met with a priest and expressed an interest in …

A few years ago, I became invested in spirituality as a humanistic subject. By “humanistic” I mean a category that pertains to the humanities more than to the history of humanism per se, but also something irreducible to religion or theology, which is where one typically finds attention to spirituality. Or so one used to. …

When I was eighteen and a freshman at UC Irvine, I was deeply unsure of what I wanted for my short- and long-term future. Of one thing I was certain: I did not wish to be a college student. Symptomatic of that wish to be elsewhere and otherwise, I made a weekly trip up to …

“Do you consider yourself postsecular?” That was the last writing prompt I crafted for students of my graduate course on postsecular theory this semester. The responses were creative and frequently moving, as I expected they would be. More on those responses, including my own, below. First, let me provide some backdrop for those who may …