Category: Teaching

Today’s One-Liner (#225)

What I call “another sort of learning” is the finding and reading those seminal books that take us to the truth and order of things.  ––James V. Schall, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught

Faith and Testimony

As thousands of faculty committees have found out, “teacher evaluation” is a hopeless business. There is, thank God, no teacher meter, and there never is going to be one. A teacher’s major contribution may pop…

Gratitude/2

For my teacher Marc H. Ellis who gave me apt advice when I nervously started started teaching in 1997: “Don’t worry about what the students give to you. Just give everything you’ve got to your…

Harvard Joke about Jesus

“A fine teacher, but didn’t publish.” –Quoted by George Steiner, in Lessons of the Masters, p. 33. Steiner observes, “A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise…

Students/1

We Know In that spring semester courseThere were 40 studentsThe official limit was 35But I let more in Before starting The Book of MevI asked“How many of youHave known someone— A family memberA friend, a…

Another Class Is Finished

Appreciation is the sacrament. —Allen Ginsberg Another class is finished…the autumn one entitled “Facing the Future: Resources for a Rebirth of Wonder” “Rebirth of wonder” comes from lines in a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem— “I am…

Recent Classes

Bob Dylan Approximately [Summer 2019] The Essential Edward Said [Summer 2019] An Introduction to Simone Weil: Concentration Is Consecration [Spring 2019] Ram Dass and Be Here Now: American Sadhana and the Search for the Real…

At the End of the Semester

For friends in Spirituality of Service & Social Justice classes I want us to be freer I don’t want us to be in thrall to guilt I want us to let our light shine Why…