This sharing will revolve around questions I get frequently: Whatever led you to choose this as an academic specialization? Why does Islamic religious studies matter? What do Islamic religious studies specialists actually study, and what…
Mayumi Oda, I Opened the Gate, Laughing: An Inner Journey Mayumi’s inner journey meant getting divorced from her husband (John Nathan) and reconnecting with the Buddhism of her youth, as well as finding her path…
It should come as no surprise that black folks would immerse themselves in this Russian literary tradition that is so profound in its willingness to raise unsettling questions. They say when you go into James…
My friend Andrew Wimmer emailed the following to some of us, and gave me permission to share here… In May 2016, Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker: “There is a simple formula for descriptions…
Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties 1954-1958, edited by Gordon Ball During winter and spring of 1996 I went on a binge of poet Allen Ginsberg’s books: poems, letters, photos, journals (I was taking a break from…
Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire University of California Peress, 1995 In the summer of 2017 I had the immense pleasure of reading Richardson’s stunning biography of the U.S. sage, and noted…
Most educated people have read or at least heard of Virginia Woolf, the brilliant modernist writer and member of the Bloomsbury Group whose works include To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and A Room of…
At the Richmond Heights gym She resembled Kathy Kelly, hair-wise She walking on the treadmill Reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer
When people who know one another have lived in the same landscape for a long time, they are surrounded by reminders of the dead in one another’s faces and in the landscape itself. In such…
Eknath Easwaran, With My Love and Blessings: The Teaching Years 1966-1999 In Photographs & His Own Word Nilgiri Press, 2000 For Chris and Andrew As we contemplate what an urban-rural ashram could look like, an…