This is a "guest blog" from my old friend Martha, my one-time Dean of Faculty who got me involved in a writing group, part of the inspiration for my current life. We also once went on a pilgrimage from Statesboro, Georgia, where she was then chairing the department of Writing and Linguistics, to New Orleans, post-Katrina, so I could visit Selma. She's recently written an academic book on why reading books still matters, but I think it is important enough to deserve a wider re

Strange beginnings to some thoughts about epigenesis. For those of you who aren’t sure what that means, it’s the part of biological development involving gradual differentiation of an unstructured embryo from genotype into phenotype (that is, from what is encoded in the genes to what actually appears as an organism). Much of our development is not so much directly determined by the genes, as by all sorts of influences about how the genes actually get expressed, many of which

One of the most iconic images of the Vietnam war era was of the “Napalm Girl,” Phan Thi Kim Phuc, her clothes burned away by American napalm, running toward the camera of AP photographer Nick Ut, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1972 photograph. Mr. Ut played a role in getting her covered and helped. She spoke at the College where I taught, now married and with several children of her own. The biblical quote in my title was about helping, that as you help the least of these,

“This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin, 1971 They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. I remember the day my first-born son gave his older sister a severe tongue-lashing, his patience with her finally running out. I was proud as can be of his amazing verbal acumen, but finally disturbed, not just with how hurtful a wicked tongue can be, but in recognizing my own dark side, in

A personal example, using myth to understand and make sense out of the course of one’s life, is from my early academic journey. It uses Moby Dick as a framing device. I also now have a few drafts under my belt of a fuller short memoir, “Call Me Ishmael.” It came to fruition in structuring a story of this part of my life in my early days as a psych professor at Elizabethtown College, my second academic post. I think it got shaped while teaching a course on theories of personal