Tag: love
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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May 29, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Today’s blog continues a theme from the previous two weeks. You can find those blogs here and here.
I am still using chapter three of Candide as the basis for my definition of charity. Charity has many potential definitions such as “benevolent goodwill toward or love of humanity;” “generosity or helpfulness toward the needy or suffering;” or “the theological virtue by which humans love God above all things.” Charity can be synonymous with compassion,
April 2, 2021
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
As a reader, and a human, I am always drawn towards love’s many dimensions. Unlike Janus who faces in two directions only (forward and backward), love is indescribably complex. For that reason, it absolutely fascinates me. Although Louise Glück’s book Ararat from 1990 includes many moments of pain and loss, it also offers an amazing lament for the idea of love.
February 12, 2021
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Language has the power to both escalate and de-escalate tense situations. Sometimes a well-intentioned comment fits perfectly, and sometimes it causes more harm than good.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is often considered a love story. However, over the years, I have come to see it more as a story of war. The very first scene of the play introduces a family feud,
December 11, 2020
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, I wrote a blog dedicated to understanding the nature of Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s love in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. Though I had previously argued against the idea that they were actually ever in love, I have since changed my mind. In fact, this passage might best explain it all. I do contend that their love was complicated and imperfect,
December 4, 2020
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The tricky nature of love never ceases to amaze me. George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch explores many complicated examples love. Today’s blog will focus on the relationship between Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy. Rosamond is Lydgate’s second love. Before moving to Middlemarch, he had fallen for an actress. Though we don’t know much about this experience, the narrator does tell us that he when he confessed his love to her,
August 7, 2020
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Today’s blog is really just what the title says, an experiment in voice. By combining a number of voices that I have recently read, I stitched together a found poem. This is a fun way to transition from season to season. As summer draws to a close, always too soon for my liking, I decided to put together some of the voices that I spent time with this summer.
February 14, 2020
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Myth,” from Native Guard, beautifully describes what it is like to seek the impossible. Trethewey wrote the poem as an expression of sorrow at the loss of her mother. Written as a palindrome, it is a perfect representation of loss because the poem cycles again and again, beginning and ending in the same place much like the endless cycle of loss.
May 10, 2019
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
I am blessed with strong women in my ancestry. Like most women, however, I find that their strength is often invisible. This invisible strength appears daily, hourly, routinely, in the way they made time for others, spent late hours fixing others’ problems, carrying the weight of the household in more ways than one. I love Alberto Ríos’s poem “Nani” which eloquently demonstrates this idea of invisible love.
September 14, 2018
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Shakespeare is a favorite topic of mine, and of many of our students. Recently, I read and discussed Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Though we didn’t have time to compare it to Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde, I wanted to spend a few moments doing just that. Before I do,
» Read more about: Shakespeare’s Troilus Versus Chaucer’s Criseyde »
March 2, 2018
Thanks to James Keller, a 2018 Harrison Middleton University Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
In leaving Carthage, Augustine abandoned his mother, Monica. A widow, she pleaded with her son not to leave – or, if he must go, not to leave her behind. She would come with him. He lied to his mother, offering her the false comfort that he was not leaving but was only seeing off a friend.