Lost and Found in Translation
Excerpted in Prism from Shadows and Echoes , the Language and Literatures Department’s publication, in 2004. In what Shadows and Echoes hopes will be an annual feature, “Lost and Found in Translation” takes a poem by Emily Dickinson and translates it through a number of…
Wanted: Fellow Conspirators
Originally published in 2003 The daily headlines reflect the relentless march to war and violence: probable war in Iraq, continuing strife in the Middle East and the “war” on terror. Like other members of faith communities across the globe, I find myself wondering how I,…
Reappraising the Rift Between Faith and Reason: Could Science Help Us Think About Religion?
Originally published in 1991 Tertullian, an African Christian writing in the second century of the Church, is perhaps most famous for his defiant one-liner about the resurrection, “I believe it because it is absurd.” The only trouble is: he never wrote those words, and wouldn’t…
Cutting Medicine Down to Size
Originally Published in 1992 I thought I was used to medicine’s ever-expanding horizons, but I wasn’t prepared for this one. “We’ve got a dilemma we want some philosophers to help with,” said a pediatric endocrinologist on the other end of the line. As I quickly…
Should History Tell a Story?
Originally Published in 1990 It would appear that Louis XIV never said: “L’ état, c’est moi.” The researches of modern historians have produced no credible witness attesting that France’s Sun King pronounced this coldly witty laconism. But just try to find a modern history of…
Expanding the Mind in German Studies
Originally Published in 2016 The German word for the humanities is die Geisteswissenschaften – literally translated, the sciences of the spirit or of the mind. The term, coined by the historian Wilhelm Dilthey in the 19 th century, has its roots in the German philosopher…
Healing Vocations: Studying Religion and Healing at PLU
Originally Published in 2014 Sometimes being sick isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, what it means to be sick —or to be healthy for that matter— might surprise us. As the growing field of Religion and Healing shows, our understanding of what…
Being a Scholar-Teacher and a Teacher-Scholar
Originally Published in 2014 If you read the acknowledgements of the books that I’ve written, you will notice that I always thank some group of students for their help and insights. With The Task of Utopia , I thanked a particular class of students who…
The Two Desks
Originally Published in 2014 When I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, the classicist and writer Anne Carson came to campus to give a reading and a colloquium. During the colloquium, she was asked how she navigated among the wild variety of…
Scholarship, Sleep, and Self in the Pandemic
Nancy Simpson-Younger sits at her desk, poised to explain how communicating remotely is completely different from speaking face-to-face, when a loud bang sounds from behind her. She laughs. “That was my cat knocking the little whiteboard off the back of the bookshelf.” She considers the…