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We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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August 14, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
After Job loses everything (including his health), but before his friends come to “comfort” him, Job’s wife offers a rare sentence of advice. No other female speaks in the Book of Job so it caught my eye. She suggests that Job should end his misery. By the end of chapter 2, Job is in a truly pitiful state.
August 7, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Before I selected the Book of Job as the focus of the July Quarterly Discussion, I knew a little bit about Job. I’d heard snippets at church, an occasional reference to the plight of the unfortunate, and the question “why do bad things happen to good people?” Honestly, that’s all that I knew of Job. So, imagine my surprise to read forty-two chapters of gorgeous poetry!
May 29, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Today’s blog continues a theme from the previous two weeks. You can find those blogs here and here.
I am still using chapter three of Candide as the basis for my definition of charity. Charity has many potential definitions such as “benevolent goodwill toward or love of humanity;” “generosity or helpfulness toward the needy or suffering;” or “the theological virtue by which humans love God above all things.” Charity can be synonymous with compassion,
May 1, 2026
Thanks to Chinyere Okoh, a 2026 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s blog.
Beyond the Silence
by Chinyere Okoh
I find myself alone in a still room,
where shadows seem to stretch and exhale with me.
The quiet carries a single, fragile question that lingers in the air:
Where am I?
The voice feels both distant and familiar,
as though it belongs to me and yet echoes from somewhere beyond. » Read more about: Rebuilding Connections: Book Review of Together by Vivek H. Murthy, MD »
January 30, 2026
Thanks to Sabahat Ali Wani, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
Hairpins to earrings, scarves to sleeves—as a visual artist, I search for, collect, and use Kashmiri women’s clothes and accessories in my practice, primarily intending to shed light and document our lives, stories, and memories of resistance. That is at the core of my art: resistance, a medium to represent and record Kashmiri women’s narratives.
» Read more about: From Kashmir—Hairpins and Earrings, Scarves and Sleeves »
January 23, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Peter Brook’s version of Lord of the Flies opens to church bells and a stream of photos from and English boys’ school. The photos and audio include math lessons and angelic sounding chorale arrangements, which are quickly replaced by drums and a cricket match interspersed with missiles, airplanes behind Big Ben, and a chalkboard list of evacuation plans.
December 12, 2025
Thanks to Ibrahim Nureni, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
In Margo Natalie Crawford’s Black Post-Blackness, tidalectics is characterized by “nonlinear” or “back-and-forth” black radical tradition of continuity in that the experiences of black people from the era of slavery to the contemporary days do not follow a parallel path but adopt a circular schema (3). English, in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness,
» Read more about: Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day”: A Serial and Tide of Black Voices »
November 14, 2025
Thanks to James Robertson, an HMU doctoral student, for today’s post.
Heraclitus tells us that we cannot return to the same river twice. With respect to Heraclitus, while this statement expresses the truth that facts are temporary and experiences fleeting, it may conceal a crucial point, one upon which it relies. We may not return to the same river, but we can return to Heraclitus. His words can enter and re-enter our experience,
November 7, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In October, I was fortunate enough to join the Great Books Council of San Francisco for a discussion of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. This book depicts an apocalyptic scenario in southern California. It begins in a tightly controlled suburban neighborhood. Stucco walls and metal fences offer a sort of boundary line between the community and the much darker,
October 31, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
For the October Quarterly Discussion, we read a selection from Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” in combination with Nelson Mandela’s statement at the opening of the defense case in the Rivonia Trial (Pretoria Supreme Court, April 20, 1964). Mandela’s speech ends with the words:
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people.