February 13, 2013 at 9:59 am
As spotted at Futility Closet, a letter from Petrarch to Zanobi da Strada, April 1, 1352: Let them teach who can do nothing better, whose qualities are laborious application, sluggishness of mind, muddiness of intellect, prosiness of imagination, chill of the blood, patience to bear the body’s labors, contempt of glory, avidity for petty gains, [...]
October 22, 2012 at 2:47 pm
An excerpt from The New Yorker magazine on “The Woman Reader” by Belinda Jack. In the history of women, there is probably no matter, apart from contraception, more important than literacy. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, access to power required knowledge of the world. This could not be gained without reading and writing, [...]
February 17, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Professor Daniel Hudon (Core Natural Sciences) writes… What’s the best kind of conversation to have, with those who share your views or those who don’t? If you want to have anything beyond a mutually agreeing chat, then you’re going to want to seek out interlocutors who don’t share your views because they’re the ones who [...]
January 18, 2012 at 12:36 pm
For almost two centuries, Charles Darwin and his theories have been studied, criticized, and validated by the scientific community and yet, to this day controversy continues to surround his work. To try and address the continued controversies of Darwin’s work, scholar Robert Dorit re-analyzes the Origin of Species in terms of time and its importance [...]
December 6, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Although “The Iliad” and Psalms were sung to the lyre, music and poetry are now separate in the minds of most literary arbiters. Yet the critic Christopher Ricks contends that Bob Dylan’s fine, surprising language establishes him as a poet, whatever his medium. Leonard Cohen, accepting the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in October, [...]
October 19, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Beyond the sheer mental workload, our thoughts have acquired a new orientation. Of the two mental worlds everyone inhabits, the inner and the outer, the latter increasingly rules. The more connected we are, the more we depend on the world outside ourselves to tell us how to think and live. There’s always been a conflict [...]
September 27, 2011 at 4:15 pm
All works of art are built from the works that have preceded them, in a series of creative reinterpretations that allow artists to explore new possibilities. As Core scholars, we are familiar with this flow of creation, but this week it took on a more literal meaning when the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam found a new [...]
September 23, 2011 at 11:24 am
From scrolls, to the codex, to e-books, like the Amazon Kindle, the format of the book is changing in our new technological age. A recent New York Times article describes this ever-changing phenomenon and what we should expect to sacrifice in giving up the good-ole paperback. In the classical world, the scroll was the book [...]
September 9, 2011 at 4:45 pm
… going carbon-based for the life-forms seems a tad obvious, no? – A comment left on God’s blog post, when He invited feedback on His world-in-progress, and updated his status to read: “Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off.” (From a humor piece in The [...]
