What do we do with old books? I mean really old books. How do we understand them when they seem so alien to us? Time can seem to be the enemy of understanding. Past texts can seem cryptic. We wonder if Chaucer is as ironic as we may like to see him or if we … More How Temporal Distance Helps Us Read
We just had the annual conference for the Society for Literature Science and the Arts in Atlanta. Haven’t heard of SLSA before? Here’s the rundown: The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts welcomes colleagues in the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and independent scholars and artists. SLSA … More Primo Levi and Creative Chemistry
Personalism is notoriously difficult to define. Sometimes I’ll read a writer and think, “this is personalism,” but then have trouble articulating exactly how. This is why Jacques Maritain quipped in The Person and the Common Good that “there are, at least, a dozen personalist doctrines, which, at times, have nothing more in common than the term … More Why I’m a Personalist Part 2
