Category: Creation
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.
CATEGORIES
April 3, 2026
Thanks to Barbara Drobot, a 2026 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
As someone who works both in the classroom as a teacher and in the studio as an artist, I often return to a fundamental question: is creativity an exceptional gift reserved for a talented few, or a human capacity that can be cultivated? In The Courage to Create (1975), Rollo May approaches this question through an existential perspective and argues that creativity emerges from the courage to confront uncertainty.
» Read more about: BOOK REVIEW: The Courage to Create by Rollo May »
April 18, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The April Quarterly Discussion focused on “Donkey Skin” as told by Charles Perrault and “The Color Master” by Aimee Bender. “Donkey Skin” stretches back to ancient Asia. There are any number of interesting twists and turns embedded within centuries of retellings. In the Perrault version, after the queen dies, the king feels pressure to marry his daughter in order to fulfill the queen’s dying request.
August 9, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Typically, I write a blog about my intended summer reading. Though I did not get around to writing that blog this year, I would like to share some of the great findings from the books on my summer reading list.
As a child, fiction wholly captured me. I remember feeling frustration at having to put down books like Anne of Green Gables or King of the Wind,
June 14, 2024
Thanks to John Wiley, a 2024 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
“Thy word can bring a sweet relief for ev’ry pain I feel.”[1] Anne Steele desperately clung to beliefs like this throughout her life. For Steele, her pains went well beyond the lines of poetry, as this Baptist hymn writer from the eighteenth century suffered from chronic illness combined with what appeared to be volatile mental health as well.
May 10, 2024
Thanks to Jennifer-NeToi Claiborne, a 2024 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s book review.
“To see with the “eyes of our hearts” (Ephesians 1:18) would be the goal of an imaginative journey and training, and the arts provide a perfect vehicle through which we can move past clogged, cluttered self absorption into the reliable communal body to experience the Spirit’s leading.” – Makoto Fujimura
As a poet,
April 12, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Seeing that April is National Poetry Month, and poetry is one of my lifelong loves, I wanted to spend a few moments to share my experience. From songs and music, to rhyme and meter, I love it all. But people often ask me what I get out of poetry, what it does for me. So, today’s blog is a little nod to a discipline and art form that I have wrestled with for years.
July 2, 2021
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
“thing within thing up to the very pinnacle of source” – Plotinus
When two mirrors face each other, whatever appears in the mirror seems to endlessly repeat. Actually, light bounces off the surface duplicating the image each time. The endless reflections are all contained within the mirror, which is the main container.
This image helps me to unpack Plotinus’s idea of the way that humans interact with the Intellectual-Principle.
June 4, 2021
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Summer provides an excellent time to write. If any of you (or your students) tire of standard five paragraph essays and thesis statements (as I do), then use the summer to free yourself of these restrictions. Today’s blog suggests a couple of ways to sharpen your writing skills and hopefully avoid boredom.
First, examine another author’s definitions.
June 14, 2019
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Ancient history can be a difficult subject for students because it is inherently foreign to them. Not only is there a language difference, but it is genuinely difficult to envision life removed from today’s technologies. When speaking of ancient cities, most people think of ancient Greece or Rome, but today I want to focus on an ancient city of the southwestern United States.
February 1, 2019
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I have a number of questions still rumbling around after Harrison Middleton University’s January Quarterly Discussion. We read Archimedes’ Sand Reckoner and G. H. Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology. I put these two pieces together because I am interested in mathematical discourse separated by thousands of years. More than time, however, they also came from different parts of the world,