The Professor's Bayonet

Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his famous work, Don Quixote, in 1605 and then the second part in 1615.  Officially titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of LaManchaland , this Spanish classic would influence literature in countless ways.  It follows the story of Alonso Quijano who so voraciously consumes tales of knightly chivalry that, soon enough, he loses his mind and deci...

The Bible is filled with them: characters who enter the action and then just as suddenly depart, leaving readers to contemplate their significance in light of the greater story being told – that of God’s everlasting love and His plan to save our souls.  The average student might be tempted to gloss over these characters in their pursuit of the wider interpretation, but Catherine Lawton is no avera...

Boubacar Boris Diop’s riveting account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide should give pause to anyone tempted to place too much stock in humankind’s ability to keep the peace.  Tensions between two ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutu, reached a tipping point, and for a span of around one-hundred days, members of the Tutsi tribe butchered the Hutu by the thousands.  It was, note some, as if the devil...

I would like to begin with a basic question: Can you give me the name of your great-great-grandfather?  How about your great-great-grandmother?  The likely answer is a simple no. The names of those on whose shoulders we stand are lost to time.  And this is to say nothing about their very lives: what they did to bring in money, what dreams they had, the quirks they possessed, the countless intricac...

Clinton, Arkansas is like any small town in America.  The backdrop for Monica Potts’s memoir, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America , this far-flung part of the world is, according to Potts, where dreams go to die.  Resources are few if any, and those who live there suffer under the weight of their own ignorance or, worse, self-inflicted wounds in the form o...

The night is darkest before dawn.  That is the saying, at least.  Just before the first faint rays of the sun arrive, the world is pitch black.  Of course, countless individuals have teased out of this reality analogies that are intended to offer perspective when things are not going well.  When circumstances are rough – really, really rough – take heart because there is about to be a reversal, pe...

I have commented on Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” in a previous episode – 51 to be precise.  The story is about how a village has a yearly lottery where one person is randomly selected to be stoned to death by the rest.  It is a tale about public execution, in other words, which, on its face, is shocking enough were it not for the fact that the vast bulk of the story is civilized. ...

Tom Holland does not claim to be a believer.  He does not follow what once was called The Way, yet his sprawling history of Christianity is populated with a host of historical tidbits that could easily win nonbelievers over to the cause.  His book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World , begins in ancient Greece with how the emerging Western culture was, indeed, primed to receive...

Clinton Romesha’s New York Times bestselling book, Red Platoon , details the deadly and savage battle that occurred in command outpost Keating in 2009.  This remote battle station in a far-flung part of Afghanistan was overrun by Taliban fighters before most of the American soldiers were even out of bed.  Described as a toilet bowl, command outpost Keating was, geographically speaking, surrounded...

The preface to Dr. Paul Kengor’s 2020 book The Devil and Karl Marx includes the following assertion: “Any ideology (and, here, he is talking about communism) with a trail of rot like this is not of God but of the forces against God.  It is not of God’s creation but a fallen angel’s anti-creation.  It is not of the light but of the dark.”  The impact Karl Marx and his pernicious ideology has had on...

In fear for his life, Old Testament prophet, Elijah, fled from the evil machinations of Jezebel and into the wilderness whereupon he found a solitary broom tree.  He sat beneath it and prayed for death, saying “Enough, Lord!  Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors” after which he reclined and fell asleep.  He had had enough.  In his mind, his best days were behind him and what remained...

David Herbert Lawrence, popularly known as D.H. Lawrence, famously penned a poem entitled “Self-Pity.”  Published in 1929, it reads:  I never saw a wild thing  sorry for itself.  A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough  without ever having felt sorry for itself.  The poem is short, but it captures so much truth about the natural world and ourselves.  What is it about human beings that we s...

Arthur Miller’s 1949 stage play, Death of a Salesman , resonates with me even today.  Willy Loman, the aged and sad protagonist, wants nothing more than to be liked: by his clients, by his boss, by his sons and wife.  Being liked is what gives his life meaning.  Being liked is what gives Willy Loman purpose.  But time waits for no man, and after a failed business trip to Boston, Willy, at the prom...

Scott Gould can be forgiven for plot structures that are a little too on the nose and convenient. The events that unfold in his book, Peace Like A River , are neatly stacked, making the story feel a bit contrived. He can also be forgiven for being a trifle too liberal with endowing each and every character with some quirk. The formula chaffs; indeed, it compromises Gould’s ultimate thesis, which,...

Twentieth-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously argued that there is slippage in language, resulting from the break between the signifier and the signified.  A signifier is the word we see – on a piece of paper, a billboard, a computer or smartphone screen, wherever – and the signified is what that word points to in order to give it meaning.  We see the word “cat,” for example – a si...

Years ago, my paternal grandfather taught me about the benefits of lying fallow. It is an agrarian term, meaning to leave alone for a period of time a piece of land typically used to grow produce. Simply put, it is the act of not sowing seed.  Let the field grow as it may. No planting. No fertilizing. No weeding.  Nothing.  The idea is to let a piece of land naturally replenish itself. Rest. Not b...

In an early episode, I shared how much the Transcendentalists impacted my decision to major in English.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in specific, captured my imagination with his erudite rallying calls to trust thyself, to never imitate others, to believe in the sacredness of your own mind.  In retrospect, I can see how this would be quite appealing to a young man full of ambition and (ahem) himself; how...

Want your work reviewed and featured?https://48bconsulting.com/book-reviews/ Much has been said and written about John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men . The tale of two bindlestiffs, Lennie and George, teaches readers about loyalty and love, sacrifice and justice while also imparting the value of parallelism and foreshadow in storytelling.  For those who would benefit from a refr...

Popular during medieval and Renaissance Europe, The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical concept that organizes the entirety of the universe, beginning with God and going down to the lowest of life forms.  It ranks every member of creation as a way to understand it and, hence, give deference where deference is due.  First, there is the Trinitarian God, and beneath Him, the various orders of ange...

I am no theologian; however, I know enough about the Old Testament to be able to say that Christ and His cross are prefigured in it on numerous occasions: in Adam and Noah, in Joseph and David, in the rod of Moses, the prophecies of Isaiah, and, more on the nose, the sacrificial lamb.  What the Old Testament anticipates, the New Testament fulfills, making followers of Christ, Christians or little...

Inez Feltscher Stepman recently made the argument in the National Review that men should have their own space.  Before the 1990s, she writes, The Elks Club, the Virginia Military Institute and the Boy Scouts were exclusively male; however, with the fanatical push of so-called progressive ideologies, these institutions are now co-ed.  In fact, the cry to eliminate all-male spaces was vociferous, re...

The book, entitled Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, had once been required reading at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The story amounts to a revealing dialogue between man and beast, the latter at the helm of a one-student classroom.  After giving his own origin story, Ishmael, the telepathic gorilla, turns his attention toward humankind’s origin story or, at least, one version – the sort of...

The short story begins in a Florida hotel room on a stiflingly hot day.  A young woman – called “girl” throughout – is sitting in a chair.  She is wearing nothing but a white silk dressing gown and reading an article entitled “Sex is Fun—or Hell.”  The phone rings.  It is a call from New York.  The girl’s mother.  Inquiring about the trip and, importantly, the girl’s husband.  Is he acting funny? ...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” is a staple when it comes to teaching symbolism.  The title character leaves his wife, Faith, at home before entering a dark and gloomy New England forest.  There, he first encounters a man with a walking stick on which is carved a serpent that appears to move.  The man, dressed in “grave and decent attire,” seems to be expecting Young...

It is likely that other professors have asked this question, so I may not be entirely original with this particular lesson.  I begin class by asking my students to make a choice.  Someone has to die.  And the choice is this: It could be one thousand individuals in some far-off land (their choice), one hundred Americans, ten folks from their neighborhood, or just one person from their immediate fam...