Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
The following post was written by Blair Bateman, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and one of the Humanities Center’s Faculty Fellows. Earlier this semester I had the opportunity to attend a Humanities Center Conversation on capacity of literature to develop empathy for others. In preparation for the meeting, participants were invited to read a …
Among his many teaching goals when he arrived at BYU in 2004, Professor Patrick Madden wanted to expose creative writing students to far more classical essays than they were used to (often they were used to zero), and he wanted to avoid costly, unwieldy coursepacks. His solution was an online anthology of public-domain essays (originally published before 1923) …
The Utah Literacy Project is a door-to-door survey initiated by Wendy Baker Smemoe, assistant professor of English language and linguistics, with Brad Wilcox in the BYU McKay School of Education and Russell Warne, assistant professor of psychology at Utah Valley University. The survey includes questions about the ability to read prose, numbers, documents, and information on computers. The …
French Summer Camp Each year the Department of French and Italian sponsors a thirteen-day French Summer Camp for high-school students. The French Summer Camp has been held on the BYU Campus every June since 2010. Last year, seventy-two high-school students attended the 2014 camp. Participants came from across the United States (fourteen states) and from …
During his service as an LDS temple president in Recife, Brazil (from 2009-2012), Professor Frederick G. Williams of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese gave public lectures in Portuguese on Dr. Frederick G. Williams, Counselor to the Prophet Joseph Smith. Since returning home from his mission, Professor Williams has given the same lecture in English …
On January 7, 2015, two gunmen entered the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve members of the staff. Further attacks on police and civilians ensued. Quickly branded in the US as France’s equivalent to 9/11, the incident incited debate over a wide range of issues: religious extremism, cultural conflict, political policies …
As I listened to news of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, my first reaction was shock and condemnation. But, as events unfolded and news continued to pour out, I realized that blame might not be so easy to place. Of course, the attack was a tragedy as is every loss of human life, especially by …
The following post was written by Beau Hilton, one of the Humanities Center’s Snow Fellows. Please forgive the cliché. New Year’s blog posts are worn out and profligate, and this one even commits the crime of tardiness. However I try to remain aloof from the notions and gyrations of New Year reflections and resolutions, I …
While the BYU Humanities Center, as its mission statement declares, features the language, literature, thought, culture, and history of the human conversation, the overarching idea of conversation places language at the center of that mission. The commitment to language is evident in many Center activities, not least of which is the formation of a new …
Matthew Wickman, Director of the BYU Humanities Center Recently, and coincidentally, I read two articles on the same day that seemed to speak to, and yet past, each other. One was in The Salt Lake Tribune and bore the ominous title “BYU Prof Fears Mormon Scholars Are Giving In to Secularism,” while the other, published in …