The Verdict

Yes…

to frolicking in various oceans during Spring Break.

No…

to being so worn out by Spring Break that you can no longer function.

Faculty Quote

“Ladies, if some guy ever tells you that God told him something that you have to do, tell him to get on a ship!”

- Prof. Pat Ralston, CHOW I, on Virgil’s Aeneid

Why Christians shouldn’t vote Obama

Single-issue voter.

Today this term carries more sting than a racial slur. It’s used to belittle the “naïve” Christian conservatives who place a premium on the abortion issue. But I can’t say the label bothers me. In fact, if ruling out a candidate who supports the practice of abortion makes me a single-issue voter, then I [...]

ACORN tie no reason to avoid Obama

Jonathan Cate’s recent article linked Barack Obama to ACORN – an organization under investigation for voter registration.  He strongly implicated that this information should affect the way you vote.  I disagree.
Senator Obama has certainly been very involved with ACORN in the past, but this neither ties him to the current registration fraud scandal, nor necessarily [...]

Poet’s task like Adam’s: why poetry? part 1

In poetry class, Dr. Tate asked us to attempt to explain why we write poetry and how our poetry works. My answer is and continues to be that poetry is a process, a task of naming being. Just like Adam, we name being, and we do so in terms of the ideal.

Poetry gives form to [...]

Time to revisit Tolkien after media frenzy

Now that the shark-like media frenzy has ended, it may be possible to do some productive reading of Tolkien again. For those of us who are slightly uncomfortable with the idea that our children will inevitably see Elijah Wood’s face when the name “Frodo” is spoken, where we had only our imagination to define his [...]

W film: premature statement

Presenting a hasty narrative is a huge temptation in an election year. Case in point: Oliver Stone’s audaciously timed Bush biopic, W. Released just weeks before Election Day, W purports to tell the Bush story from the beginning, and as you might expect, the film paints in embarrassingly broad strokes.

The opening scene is Bush preparing [...]