The Blackboard

How has your intellectual practice prepared you not just for success but also for failure?

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence.

Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts.

Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but especially scholars of the humanities–to think differently about their life.

Students sometimes come to us in crisis, but always they come from a world filled with challenges and are with us only for a season. We could do far worse as professors than to model our approach to education and guidance on Dante’s Virgil and walk with our students until another valley opens to them.

Preserving moral authority in schools would truly be something to cheer about.

It’s said that seeing is believing. And even sleight-of-hand may be caught in the act if you watch closely enough. But things began to...

After years of research, I have developed a three-stage teaching method that breaks new ground in pedagogical theory: Stage 1: Pay attention. Stage 2: Be astonished. Stage 3: Tell about it.

The unspent beauty of nature that Hopkins saw has much to teach us even if we’re not always paying attention. But paying attention is always better.

The frictionless existence we were promised, one that freed us from slavish obedience to place and tradition and family bonds, turns out to be one in which we amorphously float about in a gelid atmosphere longing for the halcyon days of family farms and quaint communities.