What do we do when we believe that people we disagree with are not only misguided, but evil, and a threat to our society, values, or even the world? If we believe that the depth of the threat excuses actions we would otherwise condemn (e.g., violence, humiliation, theft, separation of families), we are confronted with…
I’m teaching two stage combat workshops this month: 1. Moving like a Master: Brief intro/review of the basic attacks and parries with a sword, learn a simple sequence, then work on how to add physicality and nuances that convey different levels of skill/background. No experience necessary, some prior exposure to stage combat and familiarity with…
To promote this summer’s Ithaca Shakespeare shows, I wrote the following piece trying to share some context on the weapons we use on stage. One of the innovations of Renaissance drama was the recognition that scenes of physical conflict can convey a character’s virtues, foibles, or identity more vividly than words alone. In ancient…
The tournament in this summer’s production of Pericles may be the most complicated choreography we’ve done in our years of choreographing fights for Ithaca Shakespeare Company. While the text doesn’t even require the tournament to take place on stage, Director Steve Ponton always loves to give the audience a good fight, and we’re happy to…
Three years ago I set out to read one book from every aisle in the stacks of Cornell University’s Olin library. 60 books later (and nearly halfway through the third floor) I am certain that I would not have requested or sought out more than two of those books from other libraries, but I am…
Project status update: I realized I’ve been doing this reading project for over three years; I’ve read 60 books, done write-ups on 13, and am over halfway through one side of one floor of the library. At this rate it would take me another 40 years. Time to pick up the pace. Yvonne Chireau’s Black…
Reading about religion can be incredibly inspiring and can also break your heart. The longing for a better world and self-sacrifice that people feel for the sake of goals beyond personal self-interest move me deeply, and yet historical accident, lust for power, or misunderstanding can equally lead to tragedy. I lost two grandparents in the…
I really enjoy being a part of a University community. Even though I’m staff and not faculty, I like the sense of shared purpose, identity, and value of knowledge that it implies and conveys. At the same time, I often want to think/exist as an individual, and believe that mindlessly accepting communal ideals is an…
I’d been curious about Augustine’s Confessions since reading the argument for Augustine as the first self-aware/introspective author laid out in “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” He is self-reflective, but also so focused on identifying orthodoxy (and refuting paganism/other heresies) that even his autobiographical elements feel driven by an argument or agenda. It seems to me…
For several hundred (if not thousand) years society’s most probing and thoughtful, truth-seeking minds studied and wrote about religion. In an era where literacy was scarce, I greatly appreciate the time, effort, and rigorous application of logic to difficult paradoxes or questions posed by theology. At the same time, there’s a real risk that debating…
In my day job advising MBAs pursuing consulting careers, I give a lot of students practice interviews, especially case interviews. A typical case interview presents a hypothetical business/client problem and asks the student to lay out a structured approach to the problem. So far, so good. At some point in some cases, however, the student…
A friend recently asked me how I choose what books to read in the course of this project, whether I enjoy them all, and commented that an inherent weakness of most algorithm-based recommendations is that they simply recommend more of the same, and don’t recognize when you might want a change. I admit to sometimes…
