“O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer Our spirits by Thine advent here Disperse the gloomy clouds of night And death’s dark shadows put to flight. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.” Shortly after Jesus’ birth, Mary and Joseph brought him to Jerusalem where they encountered a man named Simeon. The Holy Spirit had promised Simeon that he would not die … Continue reading In Praise of Joy
It was the beginning of Junior year, and my friend Tara was helping me unpack my junk into our off-campus house. Like the good, patient individual that she is, she did not question how I had remembered to bring 27 different notebooks and forgotten my toothbrush, but all the same, there was something in my collection even she could not overlook. “What is this?” I … Continue reading Make Your Choice: Finding the Human Element Behind Technology
Three Reflections on Weezer’s Blue Album 1 By Noah Weinrich Weezer’s “Blue Album” is stuck in my CD player. Over the last ten months, the album has spun in my car’s stereo over a hundred times. No matter where I’m driving, what I’m doing, or who I’m with, the Blue Album is there. This album is remarkable for seamless synthesis of music with lyrics and … Continue reading Stuck in the Tape Deck
“Don’t scorn your life just because it’s not dramatic, or it’s impoverished, or it looks dull, or it’s workaday. Don’t scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you’ve got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.” ― Philip Levine 1. The first poem I remember hearing was Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” I was seventeen and flush with testosterone and pride … Continue reading Dirty Miracles: An Excavation of Southeast Michigan
by Katie Davenport Ralph Waldo Emerson and I don’t get along. At least, I’m assuming we wouldn’t have, had we both lived in the same century. His belief in the divinity of man and his failure to account for evil compel me to agree with Herman Melville’s assessment of his philosophy: “God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this.”[1] And yet, … Continue reading A Time to Listen, and a Time to Ignore: Finding Your Voice in a Sea of Criticism
A Christmas Karl “You know Engels and Brezhnev and Trotsky and Lenin Castro, the Chairman, and Krushchev and Stalin But do you recall The most famous Comrade of all?” The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. From the patrician and the plebeian, the lord and the serf, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, we see this struggle. Here is the … Continue reading A Christmas Karl
We face two facts of life during December: Christmas is upon us and we are tired. We will soon return to family in other cities and other states, communities that did not delight in or endure the same things that we did this fall. There may be a sense of dissonance. Maybe this is not everyone’s experience, but sometimes I find it is mine. When … Continue reading Letter from the Editor, December 2016
By Hannah Niemeier Poet Peter Gizzi doesn’t like language any more than a geologist likes dirt; sometimes it gets in the way of his meaning. But what he finds beneath the dust of worn-out words is always precious: It was a language to eat the sky a language to say goodbye standing with others standing in the dust. The old language continues its … Continue reading Death Declared, Life Questioned: Peter Gizzi Resurrects the Lyric Poem
It’s been nearly a year since my trip to Israel, and I am still trying to process it. Maybe it’s because the trip was wedged between two hectic and difficult semesters. Maybe it’s because I had no idea what to expect, especially since the only knowledge of Israel I had to bring with me on the trip came from the Bible. Or maybe it’s because … Continue reading The Bedrock of Israel: Churches and Sacred Places in Israel
Hillsdale is not the real world–but it can teach us how to live there. By Madeline Johnson The trip from home to college or back is a sort of trauma, the trauma of dying in one world and being born into another. In the portal between the worlds, that single moment of death and birth, you are utterly alone, the unaccountable soul that counts as … Continue reading There and Back Again: A Student’s Tale
Hillsdale Forum 