Is knowing the complex history of the words “sex” and “gender” going to solve the contemporary debates around sexual difference and society? Probably not. But words do matter. Knowing their history just might help avoid misunderstanding at the critical juncture of some important conversation. We could certainly do worse than begin such discussions with clear definitions.
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“Blood and Wine”
Original Poetry from Dietrich Balsbaugh
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The Phenomenology of Phineas and Ferb
They prize summer above all else. Why? It is full of potential, and unfinished narratives, embodied experience, and sensory experience with others. “Summer” becomes a stand-in for a life well-lived in the particulars. It’s making-do with the odds and ends we’ve been given, bucking convention, and rising to the occasion.
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On Liberals and Liberal Education
Recent articles of note from the world wide web.
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“Request and Variations”
Original Poetry from J.D. Smith
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Get a Clue
We went on to discover that this “clew” was a northern English and Scottish fragment of Old English cliewen which meant "sphere, ball, skein, ball of thread or yarn.” Going back even further, it appears as if this word might even go back to a common root meaning a mass of clay which also produced our modern words “glue” and “gluten.” In other words, a big ol’ ball of something. Dough? Bread? Suddenly we’re in the dark forest of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, that ill-fated “clew.”
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Charlotte Brontë on Morality and Convention
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
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Camus on Depth of Feeling
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
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Sir Richard Livingstone on the Value of History
A man who knows the origins of the world in which he lives, looks at it with more understanding, walks in it with securer and more certain steps; he is less intimidated by words, for he knows their history, less inclined to either excessive respect or contempt for existing institutions, for he sees how they came to be there. He understands the world better, as parents understand a child whom they have known from its cradle better than a stranger understands him, and he is more confident and capable in handling it.
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Vendler on Literature
Literature not only allows but encourages the interpenetration of the senses, the imagination, and the intellect — the "whole person," as we might say — in a way that our everyday texts (the advertisement, the obituary, the brochure from the computer company) do not. This integration of all the faculties of human nature at once, presented in a poem, becomes, as we internalize the poem, an integration of ourselves within ourselves.
