A few days after I was asked to contribute an essay to the Forum, one of the editors asked if I could write about my experience of being back at Hillsdale as a professor. In trying to meet this request, it is tempting to title this piece “There and Back Again,” but I think the published title is more appropriate. Perhaps a good place to … Continue reading Doctor Tripepi in the Multiverse of Memory
I remember reading an essay by a fellow ex-seminarian critiquing our former institution and its late rector for alleged failures to provide adequate emotional support to young men, for its rigid notions of masculinity, and other such micro-aggression. Coming from a center-left place, his article only differed in details, but not in essence, from the right-wing critiques of seminaries as dens of sodomy yielding the … Continue reading Priesthood as Craft, Not Science
Continued from last issue. O’Connor’s sense of the fantastic nature and Rev. Ames’ wonder at the lovely particularity of creation are, in my experience, unusual among Christians. In fact, it’s rare among people anywhere, no matter their religious perspective. This general inattentiveness to nature’s quiet glories draws the attention of Emerson, for instance, in his book Nature, where, regarding the stars, he writes, “Seen in … Continue reading Things Below: Thoughts on the World and Literature, Part Two of Two
When on July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, he didn’t open his remarks as one would expect, by quoting a passage of scripture. The young men to whom he spoke were, after all, seminarians who had spent their time at Harvard studying the Bible and preparing for a career in the ministry. We’d assume that the speaker … Continue reading Things Below: Thoughts on the World and Literature, Part One of Two
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Come December (or November, or October—there’s no accounting for taste), when our townspeople begin to erect, not only trees and lights, but monstrous, inflatable snow globes; when entire radio stations change over to non-stop holiday music, oppressive with a surfeit of sleigh bells; when our august retail institutions flood the market with plastic consumer goods designed to … Continue reading Caroling with Scrooge
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