It’s funny how we change, the older we get. I am only 30 but I am continually surprised how every year seems to bring me exponentially farther from who I was before. Maybe time speeds up the longer you have been alive. Or maybe it slows down. It’s little things that surprise me, like plastic […]
On Plastic Bags, Sugar Cookies, and the Art of Giving Thanks Read More »
As rhetoric and arguments tend to come up in the classes that I teach, we invariably spend some time talking about enthymemes. An enthymeme is a specific type of logical argument–a syllogism–in which either a premise or the conclusion is left implied or unspoken. So, for example, the statement, “Josh is a good husband because
When I told my wife what this week’s poetry blog would be about, she said it was “a shameless plug for The Silmarillion. I told her that she was absolutely right. The Silmarillion is, I would argue, the most imaginative work of literature ever created. Whereas most mythologies are created by whole groups of people
In response to a previous post, someone put forward the sensible question, “What does ‘secular form’ mean? Is there actually such a thing?” I wrote a fairly lengthy response to this, but upon sending said response I found that it had been deleted. This post, therefore, will be aimed at exploring this question. The word
Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Chesterton (and John Donne) but I’ve been thinking about paradox–and in particular how virtue is inherently paradoxical. Virtues often–if not always–require a negative, un-virtuous impulse in order to exist most fully and develop into their highest potential. That’s quite a claim, so let me back it up with a
In my last post I discussed the importance of form, but one way to understand that practically is by seeing how form directly shapes and guides our understanding of content. Take music, for example. For instance, there is a (dreadful) song by Taylor Swift called “We are never ever getting back together”. The lyrical content
The backyard where our children play is covered in brittle, brown leaves now that fall is upon us. My wife had the genius idea of using a rake to carve a series of small ‘roads’ that snake in and out of the trees, and my two- and three-year-old boys absolutely love it. They spend hours
The Shield of Achilles by WH Auden She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. A plain without a feature, bare and brown, No blade of
There is a writing assignment that I do with my classes (slightly modified) that involves studying a picture–really capturing a picture in your imagination–and then attempting to express that picture through writing, through words. Essentially, the assignment is designed to demonstrate the way language always involves some sense of loss; when we try to communicate
On Language, Loss, and the Fullness of All Things Read More »
A few days ago, after I got home from work, I took my 3-year old (Ransom) and 2-year old (Calvin) outside to the old, wooden swing-set in our backyard, which is, without a doubt, one of their favorite activities. It is also one of the few things they do in near-silence, so it is one
