I haven’t updated you for a while on my friends Alan and Jackie Paskow, former St. Mary’s colleagues. Alan has been suffering from terminal cancer for close to three years now, and Julia and I visit every Sunday night. Julia performs Reiki massage on Jackie while Alan and I talk. This past Sunday, while […]
On Saturday I wrote about how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 14th century Arthurian romance, demonstrates that our fear of death keeps us from living as fully as we could. The Green Knight’s promise to us is that, if we change the way we approach death, we will live life with heightened intensity […]
Here is a resolute poem of faith in the face of death by Emily Bronte, who I wrote on this past week. When she died three years after composing it, she did so with a fortitude that showed that she wasn’t just spinning words. Perhaps it can fortify others going through tragedy and loss. […]
Sports Saturday Today’s post is on the sport of hunting (I’ll get to the Super Bowl next week). I should warn you that some of the passages you will encounter will be graphic. They are taken from the 14th century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I am teaching at the moment. As […]
In addition to my regular classes, I am also teaching a course on novels by Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte at a local retirement center. The class has 15 students, all of them women, and I began it with several poems by Emily Bronte, the best poet of the sisters. A lyric about grieving hit […]
Spiritual Sunday Today’s post I dedicate to those who lost loved ones in the Arizona shootings—and to everyone else who has lost someone close in the past year or so. I offer up a poem by the 17th century poetry Henry Vaughan that gets at some of the mood swings that the mourners can expect […]
At the end of yesterday’s memorial service remembering those who died in the tragic Tucson shooting, the president of the University of Arizona read a poem by W. S. Merwin, recently named our poet laureate. I found a copy of it on the University’s Poetry Center website, along with the following wonderful quotation by Merwin […]
Film Friday – 2010 in Review One of my favorite holiday films is the comic melodrama Family Stone (2008), the story of a family’s Christmas reunion. Despite their determination to put on a happy front, the family must face up to a number of underlying tensions. Foremost among these is the mother’s terminal cancer, which […]
When I wasn’t teaching class yesterday, I was continuing my marathon essay-grading session. I took a break to write today’s post, however, and used a well-known poem by Langston Hughes to reflect on what I was asking my students to do. In “Theme for English B,” the only black student in a college composition course […]
