Category: education

• March 14, 2012

  On Pinterest folk

  In the Start-up section of the March 11, 2012 issue of The New York Times, I glanced at an article devoted to Pinterest. The headline runs: “Pinterest Aims at the Collector Hidden Inside All of Us.” According to its website, Pinterest is a “virtual pinboard,” a place where you can grab and pin up photos, images, color swatches–hence,…
• March 13, 2012

  On kith and kin

  As it happens, [Flaubert’s] “Un Coeur Simple” is a magisterial example of…how it is possible to enter into, and convey to others, a mental world that is not one’s own…. –Anthony Daniels, “Flaubert’s Simple Heart,” New Criterion (June 1, 2010) *   *   * My grandpa liked to take my hand in his large,…
• March 12, 2012

  ‘There is more beauty than our eyes can bear…’

  I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first…
• March 10, 2012

  On the value of paying attention: An excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

  The following is an excerpt from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (New York: FSG, 2004), pp. 28-9. The narrator, Reverend John Ames, is 76-years-old and dying. As his final word, he has decided to write a letter to his 7-year-old son. The year is 1956. In the excerpt below, he refers to Feuerbach, a prominent atheist living during…
• March 8, 2012

  A re-evaluation of CBT

  The story began with a sense of deja vu. I kept meeting new conversation partners who, in the past, had worked with a CBT practitioner or who had studied CBT quite assiduously. Not to mention that I kept having conversations with acquaintances who swore by CBT; that I kept seeing, as if by Humean association,…