Category: Experience
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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September 4, 2026
Thanks to Barbara Drobot, a 2026 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
For years, I believed I was teaching people how to draw. I assumed the greatest challenges were technical: controlling the hand, understanding proportion, mastering perspective, or measuring relationships accurately. Those skills matter. But after more than a decade of teaching, I realized they were not what held most people back.
The real challenge was learning how to see.
» Read more about: What Drawing Reveals About the Way We Think »
August 21, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The Book of Job is listed among the Wisdom books in the Bible. So part of my mission with the July Quarterly Discussion was to better understand what wisdom it imparts.
Chapters 28 and 32 of the Book of Job are the only chapters that directly address wisdom, according to the Syntopicon.
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 22, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan concludes with Jesus’s advice to be merciful and charitable. “Go and do likewise” Jesus reminds the reader. Be like the Samaritan who saw a fellow human in need and helped them.
In last week’s blog, I made a case for discussing charity in Voltaire’s Candide, basically arguing that chapter three retells the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
May 8, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The “Town-Ho’s Story” is one of the more enigmatic chapters in Moby Dick (which contains plenty of enigmatic chapters). Situated between “The Gam” and “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” the “Town-Ho’s Story” serves multiple purposes. First of all, at this point in the story, Ahab isn’t interested in any gams. He doesn’t care to chat with other whalers unless they can point him to the white whale.
April 10, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
We watched Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, … and Spring for the final film in the HMU Winter Film Series. What a film with gorgeous scenery and a wonderful narrative!
As the title would indicate, the film opens in springtime. A boy forages on a mountainside while his master, a Buddhist monk, goes into town for some supplies.
January 16, 2026
Thanks to Chad Greene, former Fellow in Ideas, for today’s blog.
“It’s like I said: I love this film. I’ve seen it over one hundred times.” – Phil Connors, Groundhog Day
Winter break was about to end. Spring semester was about to start.
In the third or the fourth week of the semester, it would be Groundhog Day. In the ninth week of the semester,
» Read more about: ‘To Watch a Master at Work’: Learning from Teaching Groundhog Day »
December 5, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
David Macaulay’s book Crossing on Time discusses the way that life inevitably changes. In it, he illustrates the making of the SS United States, an ocean liner from the 1950s. He writes about how, in his own lifetime, we moved from ocean liners meant to cross the Atlantic in less than a week to airplanes meant to cross in a few hours.
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.