Month: April 2014

I don’t really like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing. And I don’t like Ernest Hemingway or Gerard Manley Hopkins that much either. I’m not saying that their writing is bad; I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be considered “literature” — I’m simply saying that I don’t enjoy reading it.

Discourse with others only works if you both share basic assumptions. That point seems to have escaped Garrett West as he wrote last week’s op-ed “Discourse: better than debate.” In the piece, West chided me for portraying, in a previous editorial, the majority of American political science students as progressives, cultivated to become cogs in...

Go back where you came from! Find out where you’re from, and what place served the beginning of your journey in this life. Everyone has a place that she remembers from childhood — a grandparent’s house playroom, a block of a city, or the old garden and hitching post at grandmother’s hose. There are memories...

To immerse oneself in the modern literature of the past century is to come face-to-face with a deeply tragic view of human experience. Though I do not consider myself to be a conscious adherent to many of the values of the West’s intellectual and spiritual heritage, I do consider myself a beneficiary of the stability...

It was the last day of class the fall of my freshman year. We listened to Dr. Gamble cover the last several documents in the Westerm Heritage Reader and briefly go over what to expect on this first final of our collegiate career. Class finished in the odd solemnity of completion, where we all knew...