Category: Great Ideas
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 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!
June 5, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I remember being a graduate student and receiving grades with little written feedback. I often wondered if a good grade meant that the writing was good, or the ideas were good, or perhaps both. Professors do their best to balance what usually amounts to too much work, but I always wanted more advice or critiques. While the actual grade is some indication,
May 15, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In April, HMU hosted four discussions dedicated to Voltaire’s Candide. Although Candide is not solely about charity, we used this as the focus topic in each discussion. While charity is not listed as a great idea in the Syntopicon, it seems like a pretty vital idea for society. To begin our conversations,
February 27, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The soundtrack to The Hours by Philip Glass
The Hours, a 2002 film based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, weaves together the lives of three complicated women. First, Virginia Woolf is shown writing the manuscript for Mrs. Dalloway. Next, Laura Brown, a housewife in the 1950s,
September 26, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Recently, I attended a conversation on one of my favorite topics: happiness. The University of Chicago’s Graham School hosted author and professor Arthur C. Brooks in their Enduring Excellence series. I was fortunate enough to attend.
Interviewed by journalist and professor Tyler Mathisen, Brooks addressed many of the concerns of our age. The conversation began with questions of how Brooks himself stays happy and what happiness means to him.
September 5, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Try to define idea in your own words. It’s a good exercise. Much of our lives are spent dealing with abstractions that we struggle to define.
As students, our entire coursework at HMU revolves around great ideas. When outlining the Great Books curriculum, Mortimer Adler limited his selection of great ideas to about one hundred.
August 8, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I have been a competitive athlete for much of my life, which just means that I am not good at being still. Even now, watching from the sidelines stifles something inside of me. Obviously, I lack the agility and recovery of today’s athletes, but I still like to participate. Reading through some of the Stoic literature has given me reason to pause,
August 1, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Charity is not one of Adler’s great ideas, despite the fact that St. Paul claims: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (King James Version, 1Cor. 13:13). Charity is not one of Adler’s great ideas, despite the fact that many of the great authors construct entire sections of ethics based on charity itself.
May 2, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
While the Syntopicon includes happiness, it does not have a separate section dedicated solely to joy. I am curious about these emotions, how they might be similar or different. To me, joy seems more ephemeral, less permanent but more impactful whereas happiness is more of a state of long-term satisfaction.
According to Merriam-Webster, joy can be: the emotion evoked by well-being,
March 7, 2025
Thanks to Ibrahim Nureni, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
There is a widespread conception or misconception of autobiography as a retrospective prose narrative focusing on personal life and existence of a real person, who is believed to stand behind the narrative under the mask of a proper name. Autobiography is viewed as a chronological representation of authorial desired subjectivity. However, the radical interventions of poststructuralists within the premise of autobiographical discourse (as represented in the critical essay of Paul de Man “Autobiography as De-facement”) have undermined the commonsensical study of autobiography as “real-life-in-writing,” the unproblematic connections between writing and author and the conception of language as representational.