When I was eight, I saw the photo of Muhammad Ali delivering the knockout to Sonny Liston. I was awestruck. The next Saturday, when I was lucky enough to win my little league wrestling match, I tried to replicate Ali’s pose. My parents called me up to the bleachers and I received an early lesson in humility.
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How Karl Marx Saved My Christmas
I was combing through Barbies, Lego sets, and the latest versions of Monopoly in search of something to give my two-year old for Christmas. Nothing particularly excited me, and there was nothing I could think of that he actually needed. My limited parenting experience told me he would get more entertainment out of the box and wrapping paper than the actual item anyway. But it seemed bad form simply not to buy my child a Christmas gift. So there I stood.
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Backward Miracle
Every once in a while, we need prose, not poetry, says the poet. We need just the vessel with the wine and nothing more. We need a single loaf and the single fish and that is all.
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Not Many Wise, Not Many Noble
Inside the ‘museum’ was a pile of artifacts — four-hundred-year-old Bibles, sacred heart pictures, a reproduction of the shroud of Turin, old motorcycles, more dinosaurs, and a neon sign that read: “Jesus Saves.”
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Everydayness & the Restless Heart
Education, fundamentally, is about human flourishing, and in order for an education to succeed in engendering flourishing, it is necessary for it to reach the heart. It’s not enough to have a perfect grasp on Augustine, or to write a flawless essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. When I discover that the questions Augustine asks are my questions, or that Atticus Finch and I have something fundamental in common, human flourishing starts to happen.
