Category: Culture
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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November 17, 2023 Thanks to Chad Greene, a 2023 Fellowship in Ideas recipient, for today’s blog. Of the classes I teach at my community college, the closest to a Great Books class is a course called “Masterpieces of World Literature” that the English department offers every fall. In this class I ask students to …
Classics and Comics: Ancient Content – and Advice – in a Modern Form Read More »
July 28, 2023 Thanks to Dave Seng, HMU alumnus, for today’s post. To read the previous post in this series, visit hmu.edu In our last post we looked at the importance of questions and why self-reflection as individuals and a society is important. It seems part of the human situation to ask questions in order to …
July 21, 2023 Thanks to HMU Alumnus, Dave Seng, for today’s blog post. I recently participated in the fall discussion series, What the Greeks can Teach us About AI. The series focused on four Greek plays — Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus; and Herakles, The Bacchae, and Medea by Euripides. The discussions were insightful and explored …
June 30, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Back in the 90s, I spent a lot of time watching ESPN. Back then, I thought that Dan Patrick and Stuart Scott were untouchable. Fast forward a few decades, and although I no longer watch much television, I still occasionally enjoy listening to …
June 23, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. To all the “honest drinkers” – as Rabelais would have it – congratulations! We made it to the final post in this series on Rabelais. Hopefully the various connections have enriched your experience of what is often considered difficult reading. Today’s blog concludes …
June 16, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For me, reading Rabelais was slow going. Crawling through the text, however, brought moments of joy as I saw strains of other, later works. The past few blogs attempted to highlight some of those connections as a way to bridge the gap between …
May 26, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Last week’s blog (https://hmu.edu/2023-5-19-reading-rabelais-part-i/) used Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel as the foundation to connect with contemporary works. Today’s blog continues in the same vein, connecting the old with the new. As I said before, however, Rabelais is not easy reading. The language feels …
May 5, 2023 Thanks to Chad Greene, a 2023 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s blog. Sitting side-by-side on the top of my desk in the faculty office at my community college are two printed publications that contain the same story told through sequential art, “The Black Panther!” written by Stan Lee and drawn by …
April 28, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Our recent Quarterly Discussion spanned thousands of years, jumping from a play by Aeschylus to a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri. We began with Aeschylus’s “Suppliant Maidens” and then transitioned to the short story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” by Lahiri. In …
February 3, 2023 Thanks to Chad Greene, a 2023 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. The tradition of utopias in imaginative literature – whether in a dialogue by Plato, a comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, or a movie by Ryan Coogler – is an attempt to answer some of the most essential …
