Contemporary universities are doing their best to eradicate prejudice and bias. Yet one remaining prejudice—against white men—is not only tolerated but encouraged. While we are told that diversity of skin color and gender is an unmitigated good, people in faculty meetings and job . . . . Continue Reading »
If a work of literary art tells a unique and critical truth, then it is good—worth giving oneself to—and its beauty has not misled us. Continue Reading »
Emma Maggie Solberg's The Virgin Whore spends far too much time taking bad jokes and strained wordplay too seriously, and too little time taking basic theology seriously enough. Continue Reading »
If Baker and Bilbro succeed, students and professors will emerge believing that the goal is not to obtain a “good job” far away but to become a rooted, whole person. Continue Reading »
Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism deserve to be studied, not as geographic entities, but as products of religious insight. Continue Reading »
In this 500th anniversary year of the Reformation, there are countless angles from which to think about that event and its continuing significance. By no means the least important is the fact that Luther’s Reformation in particular was in many respects a university-based movement. And still in our . . . . Continue Reading »
I recently attended an academic conference at the University of Notre Dame called “Intersectional Inquiries and Collaborative Action: Gender and Race.” It felt like a return to my undergraduate years in the early 1990s. I saw women with shaved heads wearing ethnic print scarves, Birkenstocks, . . . . Continue Reading »
The great poet of the Caribbean, Derek Walcott, passed away at home on his native island of St. Lucia on March 17. It is hard to summarize his achievement. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, most notably Omeros (1990), which transplants the Trojan War to the Caribbean fishing world . . . . Continue Reading »