Category: Community

Editor’s Introduction to The Journal, Issue 31

Issue Theme: “Age of Anxiety” It has been a liminal year. Covid, war in Ukraine, and political upheaval have shaken and will continue to shake preconceived notions about the world as we know it, from the viability of liberalism to the merits of state power in protecting public health. All these sources of apparent division […]

Core Alumna Hollis-Brusky on Justice Barrett

The astute scholarly work of our alumna Amanda Hollis-Brusky was quoted in this new New Yorker piece about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Christian legal movement. An excerpt from the article that pertains to Hollis-Brusky is quoted below and linked is the New Yorker article and Hollis-Brusky’s most recent book, “Ideas With […]

Core Curriculum’s First In-Person Lecture since 2020

We’re back! After over a year of online classes, staying home, and biweekly covid tests, Boston University’s Core Curriculum has had its first in-person lecture for its Ancient Worlds course, otherwise known as CC101. As tradition would have it, the students were welcomed into the lecture to the glorious sound of Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of […]

Editor’s Introduction to The Journal, Issue 30

The online edition of the thirtieth issue of The Journal of the Core Curriculum has just been published. To help place the issue in a context of editorial goals and of the community involvement that went into its production, we hereby present the Editor’s Note from the front matter, written by the editor-in-chief: I am […]

Texts and video from our Spring community reading

On the evening of April 14, 2021, an audience of classmates, alumni, lecturers, and friends of the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum came together to hear faculty and staff share favorite texts which speak somehow to our present moment of isolation, separation and anxiety, as Auden did in his poem “Age of Anxiety.” Here is […]

The bright ghosts of antiquity by John Talbot

In this feature for The New Criterion titled “The bright ghosts of antiquity”, BU alumnus John Talbot writes about the baffling translations of the Loeb Classical Library, and wonders about the impact of such translations on the study of Latin and Greek: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2011/9/the-bright-ghosts-of-antiquity But then if your Greek were good enough, you wouldn’t be reading […]

Christopher Ricks on Milton and Blasphemy

Christopher Ricks, an esteemed professor in the Editorial Institute and the Core Curriculum here at BU, recently gave a lecture to the CC201 students on Milton and Blasphemy. This lecture discusses the incredible sensitivities of the word blasphemy, what it means to blaspheme, and how anti-blasphemy laws still impact our society today. He also discusses […]

“I think we deserve a happy ending”

Kathryn Donlan (CAS ’18) is a writer and aspiring archivist (an an alumna of CC 111!). She likes talking about literature from the perspective of social history and historical context, and in keeping with this outlook she recently shared her thoughts on Twitter on the news of a new cinematic adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. […]

Akkadian Dogs

Our first-year students are beginning with the beginning in this first week of the Fall 2020 semester, by reading the oldest book we have written copies of — the Epic of Gilgamesh. In keeping with the Mesopotamian moment, let us share these marvelous little clay dog figurines from the 7th century BCE. We spotted this […]

Kendi on antiracism

You may have read at BU Today that Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar of racism, has been recruited to join the BU faculty and to launch a BU Center for Antiracist Research. Last week, Dr. Kendi was interviewed by TED’s current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers and speaker development curator Cloe Shasha. In their conversation, […]