Gregor Mendel's Fascinating Life
Here are a couple of interesting things about Gregor Mendel that I did not know, even though I got my B.S. in a building named after him!
Pastry, Hope, and Social Responsibility
Some takeaways from ChangeNOW 2025.
Encountering Fate as Viking Men and Women
Fate sits at the heart of the Nordic sagas, lurking beneath the surface of the text like the ships intentionally sunk at Roskilde. Unseen but absolutely essential to those in the know. Detractors of these works (perhaps students in their initial exposure to this category of literature), will complain that
What Genre is Utopia?
As the new management of Idiosyncrasy Booksellers, I must be cutthroat in my shelving schemes...
Dante and the Relational Nature of the Soul
The multidimensional audacity of Divina Commedia is well established. A Christo-classical epic, written in the vernacular, chockablock with timely political commentary woven into theological exploration. Dante does not leave a single color untouched on his palette...
What if your hose doesn't fit the hydrant?
A little before eleven in the morning on February 7th, 1904, fire alarms began to sound across Baltimore. For the next thirty hours, the Great Baltimore Fire scorched the city...
The Everyman’s Epic
History is written by the victors, but the literary canon is written by the audacious...
Conrad's Romanticism
Lord Jim is not just a rollicking adventure story. Underneath the majestic prose of rich nautical fiction, the book is a philosophical parable about the merits and pitfalls of living a romantic life...
Baseball Tranquility
Baseball is a contradictory game. It inspires fervent devotion in some and a shockingly potent vitriol in others. As I began immersing myself in the game, many people asked why? Why follow such an old, slow, boring sport? Perception makes all the difference.
The Shift of the Cultural Battlefield and its Heroes
Leopold Bloom is a man struggling with the burdens of his time, just as his Homeric parallel fought the challenges of his own. As society developed from pre-Hellenic Greece through to turn-of-the-century Dublin, the burdens facing men evolved dramatically...
A Goddess of Two Sorts
Because Stephen is both protagonist and self-insert for Joyce himself, he must be considered as both poet and warrior, Homer and Telemachus...
Cave-Dweller Construction
There are two types of cave dweller. There are the sages, the Bodhisattvas and hermits. Great masters with a tendency to run for the hills and remain underneath them, forcing their pupils to spelunk for wisdom...