Category: Imagination
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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April 24, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In my undergraduate coursework, I took a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies. We read Romeo and Juliet first. I will never forget my second day in that class because it was mortifying. The professor, a white-haired theatrical visiting professor from England, was only interested in how we could read Shakespeare out loud. On our second day in class,
» Read more about: An Honor That I Dream Not of: The Practice of Reading Aloud »
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 »
August 22, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The 24th U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote a poem that has stuck with me for years. I replay this poem in my mind sometimes, like an earworm. It’s ironic, then, that the poem itself contains the phrase: “I don’t know what it/ was that made me press replay and/ replay.” In “The Mountain Lion,” Limón describes a mountain lion effortlessly leaping over a large fence.
April 25, 2025
Thanks to Sabahat Ali Wani, a 2025 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
“Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer.” ― Walter De Mulder, Belgian Photographer
A camera’s eye has enveloped and seeped into our being—not only from outside but also from within. We see like a camera’s eye. We understand, confirm, document and store our reality as images.
» Read more about: Camera’s Eye, My Eye: Re-reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) »
February 28, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I presented in the War and Culture group for this year’s Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference. War and Culture is well outside my norm, but a comment during one of last year’s roundtable discussions stuck with me. Last year, the War and Culture group was abnormally small, which seemed odd given the number of ongoing worldwide conflicts.
August 23, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
This week, I want to highlight another exceptional find from my summer reading list. This is part of a series that I began a few weeks ago and will revisit again.
A few years ago, I wrote about Fortino Sámano, a book of poetry by French poet Virginie Lalucq.
May 31, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, I mentioned that George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, contained fairy tale elements. Today, I want to explore some of those impressions a little bit more.
First of all, the novel’s young couple meet in private in a seemingly magical, secluded wood. The narrator even mentions that it is just the right place for nymphs and fairies.
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.
February 17, 2023
Thanks to James Robertson, HMU student, for today’s blog.
In a poem, Whitman writes “This is no book; who touches this touches a man” (Leaves of Grass). In contrast, Plato has Socrates observe that “writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence” (Phaedrus).