Well, kiddies, don’t say I didn’t warn ya! I suppose this was bound to happen, but I’ll reiterate what I said in more detail in a recent two-part post on Notre Dame. Long story short: be VERY, VERY suspicious of appeals to make the cathedral look “like it did before,” or making it “authentically medieval.” […]
I admit it, I’m a naughty blogger. Don’t feed the beast frequently enough, don’t interact with other bloggers enough, too Minnesotan to engage in flagrant self-promotion (guilt-free, anyway), and prone to posting when I fancy, about whatever happens to be on my mind at the time. That said, I do try to keep my posts […]
It’s fitting, I think, to be writing this particular essay on the morning of Easter Sunday, which, for Christians worldwide, is never about a return to the way things were, but about resurrection, the creation of something new, not reversion but rebirth. Easter is not about making anything great again. It’s about making all things […]
Lemme hit you with a story: A few years ago I was in Scotland for research. On a free Sunday, I took myself on an expedition to explore Linlithgow Palace, about a half-hour’s train ride north of Edinburgh. The palace is a ruin, though a majestic and fascinating one. Right next to the ruined palace, […]
This is the time of year in which I find myself continually reminding my students–not to mention myself–not to neglect self-care, even when there’s only time for small breaks. In that spirit, here’s a “review” of sorts of one of my favorite coffee-break timeouts. One of the themes of the “Tech” thread of this blog is […]
I was as disturbed as anyone tracking the reports of the “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, VA over the weekend. Disturbed by the shouted slogans, the violence, the anger, the typically disturbing imagery of swastikas, confederate flags, and automatic weapons displayed alongside American flags. All that was sickening enough. But then I noticed something […]
I Am An Immigrant There are few places in the world where I feel more rooted and at home than in my “native” Minnesota. Even here, though, in my birthplace, I use the term “native” with great caution, almost irony: one can really only call oneself a “native” of this place if one is Dakota […]
Note: I wrote this post in early July of 2016, only a few days after I’d been told by my surgeon that I had four blocked arteries and would need major surgery. I wrote this only a day or two before the surgery, not knowing if I would live to write another. I asked myself […]
I was struck recently by A New York Times column by Frank Bruni, an individual of a kind of rhetoric that’s become a species unto itself in recent years: laments about the state of the “humanities” in contemporary universities. I found myself agreeing with many of Bruni’s broadest points but questioning most of the particulars […]
A few months ago, I published a brief post on the 1320 document known as the “Declaration of Arbroath” in the midst of what was, at the time, the ramp-up to the recent referendum on Scottish independence. It contained a brief reflection on the phenomenon of using that document in political debates that post-date the […]
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