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An American student in his twenties asked me if I had heard of an author named Ernest Hemingway. The student had found an old Scribner’s paperback of Hemingway’s fiction and was enjoying it very much. When I told him that Ernest Hemingway was one of the most famous authors of the twentieth century and one of [...]
On the main street of the small town of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, stands a state historical marker commemorating Irving Female College, locally known simply as Irving College. Founded in 1856, it was a liberal arts college for women, and it closed in 1929, one of its buildings eventually becoming the town’s hospital. The college’s name honored Washington [...]
There is something in people that can only be described as a need to hate. René Girard explicated this need in his scapegoat theory: People find unity in a shared hatred for an appointed scapegoat on whom they can lay their sins (and their blame) for all that is deemed wrong or evil within the group/ tribe/ family/ [...]
In 1911, John Muir published his diary from 1869 and called it My First Summer in the Sierra. On 2 August, 1869, he recorded an odd experience. In the afternoon, while on a mountain called the North Dome, he “suddenly, and without warning” was “possessed with the notion that my friend, Professor J. D. Butler, of [...]
One word often used to describe Thomas Hoving was “brash.” A former U.S. Marine who earned a doctorate in art history from Princeton, Hoving (1931-2009) served as a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then, from 1967 to 1977, as its director. A self-described “publicity hound,” Hoving’s self-promotion included a memoir, Making the [...]
You offer your heart, your love, your labor, your time, everything you have. And no one wants it. You, and all that you have to give, are discarded like trash. This happens not just sometimes, but always, both with persons and with groups of all kinds, within your family, at work, in your church. It evolves [...]
I used to say that I wanted to “grow up into childhood”. Now in my old age, I think about that statement and about my childhood. Certainly, it was not the kind of childhood anyone would want. Much of it was brutal poverty, deprivation of all sorts of things considered fundamental for a happy, healthy child [...]
Whenever debates flare up over what should be taught in American schools about America’s past, a dusty old book comes to mind, Mary G. Kelty’s Other Lands and Other Times. Published in 1942, its subtitle, Their Gifts to American Life, indicated that it would put America in the context of continuity with a great past. It [...]