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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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.
September 12, 2025
Thanks to George Narvaez, HMU alumnus, for today’s post.
My journey with education has never been simple. Living with disability often meant that the traditional classroom felt like a place where I did not quite belong. Instructions moved too quickly, expectations shifted without warning, and the conventional ways of measuring learning rarely fit my experience.
For years, I wrestled with frustration. Why did some people seem to grasp concepts instantly,
June 6, 2025
Thanks to Estella Achinko, a 2025 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage is a masterfully crafted narrative that chronicles one of the most extraordinary survival stories in the annals of exploration. Originally published in 1959, the book recounts the ill-fated 1914 Antarctic expedition led by the indomitable Sir Ernest Shackleton. Lansing, an American journalist, skillfully reconstructs this harrowing saga through meticulous research,
» Read more about: BOOK REVIEW: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing »