By Andrew Tsai 

In his 1987 essay “The Loss of the University,” Wendell Berry prophetically describes how overspecialization of knowledge and disciplines in modern universities is a harmful product of utilitarianism and industrialization and has resulted in “career preparation” rather than an education that creates broadly-informed, fully-developed human beings capable of judgment and pursuing and knowing truth in all its forms.
 
I’ve been thinking and meaning to write about this topic for almost the entirety of my four years in college. What follows is merely an ounce of what I think about Berry’s analysis of the University (capital U intentional) and of education in general.
 
In my first semester freshman physics lab, I remember being confused about propagation of error and whether we should propagate standard deviations or standard errors. In response to my question the TA replied, “I don’t know, but you don’t need to know that,” which was the first of many instances in my education where I’ve been prescribed what I “need” and “don’t need” to know. At Hopkins, I believe that the two most frequently asked questions on campus are:
         (1) Are you premed?
         (2) Will this be on the test?
While I do concede that pragmatically it’s important to know what material students will be responsible for on the test, I also feel like the second question is more than occasionally asked with an underlying connotation of its sinister dual, “Do I need to learn this?” The question “Will this be on the test” deeply disturbs me, because I feel like what follows after “Do I need to know this for the test?” is “Do I need to know this for my major?”, “Do I need to know this for my job?”, and finally “Do I need to know this at all?” Once we find ourselves asking the last question, we’ve reached complacence with ignorance and “Do I need to know this for the test?” will have been the first step towards that end. I am about to stereotype and make an extreme, but not unfounded, overgeneralization to make a point. Isn’t it a bit hypocritical that in the current political climate “educated liberals” often disdain “ignorant conservatives,” when a large portion of our University education is predicated on what knowledge we should acquire to do well on tests and in our careers and relegate everything else to be unnecessary and not worth knowing?
 
In most of his essay, Berry criticizes the overspecialization of knowledge into “majors” and “departments” at universities that fail to communicate and exchange ideas and knowledge with each other. He doesn’t argue that the categorization of knowledge itself is harmful, and in fact acknowledges that some degree of specialization is necessary. But when the boundaries of those categories are never crossed and University departments become echo chambers of their own importance, their own success at describing truth in the world, their own influence in attracting prospective students and preparing students for careers, universities begin to rob students of a different, more complete kind of education. I agree with Berry to an extent that overspecialization is harmful to the University, but I go even further when I feel that even within particular subject domains, students—assisted by the way professors teach classes and by extension, the University—are further fragmenting knowledge into that which is necessary to know for the test and for careers and knowledge that is worth pursuing for its own sake.
The part of my education that I love is being able to draw connections and finding universal explanations between disparate subjects. There are two interpretations of Aristotle’s views of sensory perception where he writes about how sensory organs and their objects of perception “are one, but their being is different.” The first is a “literalist” interpretation in which an eye sees that a tomato is red because the eye fluid itself becomes red, leading us to perceive the tomato as such. The second is a “spiritualist” interpretation in which we somehow become aware of the tomato’s redness without our eyes taking on the form of the object of our perception. While it may be easy to condemn the first interpretation when we think about vision, when humans perceive sounds, our eardrums, auditory ossicles, inner ear hair cells, and even the neuronal firing in our brains takes on the same frequency as the sound waves that we are perceiving, which gives credibility to the literalist interpretation. I love that by learning neuroscience I can inform my study of Aristotle’s idea of perception, essences, and the soul, and vice versa. Berry’s criticism is that in the modern University, students are not instructed in how to draw these connections or even encouraged to; rather, we learn about the entirety of Aristotle’s works, and separately we learn about biological mechanisms of sense perception, but we don’t learn from them in exploring the universal truths found at the intersection of subjects that are seemingly disjoint in their contribution to our future paychecks or the national and global economic machine.
 
I bring up Aristotle as an example, because the things he has to say about learning, teaching, and what it means to be educated directly address Berry’s criticisms of modern education, which raises the question of what exactly has happened in the 2300 years separating the two. Aristotle writes:

"For experienced people know the fact that something is so but not the reason why it is so, whereas craftsmen know the reason why, i.e., the cause… A sign that distinguishes those who know from those do not is their ability to teach. Hence we think craft, rather than experience, is knowledge, since craftsmen can teach, while merely experienced people cannot."

And yet we live in a culture where “those who can’t do, teach” is a commonly and sometimes self-fulfillingly held belief, and we glorify University professors who publish research in reputable journals and rake in millions of dollars in grant money but do not or extremely inadequately teach. Aristotle also writes:

"There appear to be two sorts of competence. One of these is rightly called scientific knowledge of the subject, and the other is a certain type of education; for it is characteristic of an educated person to be able to reach a judgment based on a sound estimate of when people expound their conclusions in the right or wrong way... We expect an individual with this general education to judge practically all subjects.
And yet we joke about the Krieger School of “Arts and Crafts” and Hopkins considers removing the Humanities Center, both institutions in which students can contemplate logic, establish sound judgment of past, present, and future events, and apply an analytically critical education to all subjects." 
 
For sure Berry errs in placing all this blame on the University alone. Perhaps the faults that he finds with the modern University are just manifestations of our individual and our society’s replacement of meaningful and spiritually fulfilling experiences with an insatiable hunger for technology, instant material and secular gratification, and our fetishization of STEM in the pursuit of entirely numerical explanations of both natural phenomenon and human experience. Some of the blame definitely lies with us, the students, for fencing in ourselves to what society deems as valuable or prestigious and allowing school to get in the way of our own education.
 
During my time at Hopkins, I’ve always felt that the greatest irony is that our school’s motto is “The Truth Shall Set You Free,” when our classrooms, halls, and libraries are filled with peers enslaved by the next exam and in ultimate despair when they feel that their academic failure in one small domain of knowledge means that entire careers are now closed off to them and their futures are in disarray. While Hopkins’ motto makes our school a conveniently poetic token of the loss of the University, I’m sure similar scenes occur at other universities across our nation as well. What then is the remedy? Berry proposes that we seek a restoration of the humanities in their ability to inform on the truths of human experience, imagination, feeling, and faith. I recently heard a depressing hypothesis that science, having conquered religion as an alternate explanation for truth (when the both are not incompatible), is now taking on the humanities as its next victim in the continued purge of all non-secular explanations of our world. He urges for universities to stop viewing students as customers to keep satisfied or as parts of a machine, but rather as vehicles to influence the fate of how truth is used and applied in the world.
 
At this point, I feel like I could go on about how the loss of the University has let to the irreproducibility crisis in science, the unintended exacerbation of social inequality by machine learning algorithms, etc. Instead of finding fault with the University as Berry does in part, I feel like we should ask tough questions of ourselves and of our peers about what effect our education will have on the world. We should pursue an education for ourselves greater than what is provided to us in school and be unrestrained in our pursuit of the truth not just in the sciences, but also in the universality and interconnectedness of knowledge, our human experiences, and spiritual and religious truth. 

Resurrecting the Author
by Karl Johnson 

​In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described how politics intimately responds to the written word. At the start of the essay he writes, “[The English Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
 
I’d like to take the brief liberty of applying Orwell’s analysis one step farther, perhaps toward a position he always implied. Not only does foolish tendencies in language influence our thought, but our behavior as well. Good and honest writing is hard as good and honest thinking is hard as good and honest living is hard. A provocative Jewish man once said, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
 
20 years after Politics, the relationship between an author’s lifestyle and the language employed in his or her writing was fatally severed. When Roland Barthes wrote The Death of the Author in 1967, he argued that one could not allow the space for an author’s intentions when analyzing a written text--writing and creator are unrelated. This separation introduced modern society to the post-structuralist movement, a set of hermeneutics in which the reader replaced the author—and his or her corresponding personality—as the primary subject of inquiry.
 
Like Orwell may have predicted, I believe this subjective deconstruction of written language as intended, and the thinking it produced, may have had a direct impact on our current political mood.
 
In the months preceding the election we witnessed a growing distrust of the media nationwide—the lines between authentic journalism, “fake news”, and “alternative fact” supposedly became muddled. The end of 2016 witnessed Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year to be “post-truth” and Marrian Webster’s as “surreal”. On the back of the post-structuralist critique, as words became increasingly detached from the character of their employer, this kind of decay is natural—language will inevitably lose its own character, its own reality.
 
I am not a pessimistic person, but, with Orwell’s insights in mind, I now worry about how ill equipped most of my generation is to rectify our “post-truth” world moving forward. We have been handed down the English language, a palace of words painfully constructed over the last 1,500 years, and yet our most frequent exchanges of information are reduced to emojis, GIFs, the tagging of people in funny memes, liking Instagram pictures, and short agrammatical texts. There is certainly a good place for all of this, but when it becomes the predominant means of communication, what does that imply about our thinking?
 
Perhaps we have fake news and alternative facts because we have fake people who live alternative lives in the warped world of online avatars and not the real world, the one outside of one’s phone and with real people—a world in which it is our character that communicates before our speech or writing.
 
As Orwell provides hope for, this state need not persist. The redemption of good writing, and communication by it, can begin and be reinforced by the redemption of good thinking and living: do not be hyperbolic with your writing or emotions, do not hide your confusion about a topic with big words and don’t present yourself as a big person when you are—as we all are—not; don't settle for the use of generalities like “racist” and “xenophobic” when a much more nuanced description is more accurate, be honest with yourself about the complexity of your own identity and be patient with others as they wrestle with theirs; do not use the passive voice in writing, live a life that takes immediate responsibility for the actions done by you--I should read the media more critically, not the media should be read more critically by me.
 
It is now perhaps more important than ever that we heed Orwell’s wisdom. While many have turned to his 1984 for insight into the current political atmosphere, perhaps it is his Politics that we should be reading, and applying, first.

By Gabrielle Moss 

“Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost…How I came there I cannot really tell, I was so full of sleep when I forsook the one true way”.

It is with these words that Dante starts his epic poem, Divine Comedy, and plunges his readers into a literary pilgrimage through the farthest depths of Hell, up through the terraces of Purgatory and finally to the summit--the pinnacle of glory known as Paradise. In this masterpiece, Dante paints an elaborate depiction of the spiritual realm through which the living soul travels. The creativity of the work has been permanently imprinted on Western imagination.

However, the imagery found in Divine Comedy is only the beginning of the Dante’s genius. As he explores the worldview of medieval Christian philosophy, particularly Thomistic philosophy, it is his delineation of free-will and its implications for morality in Purgatorio Canto XVI that resonate most powerfully with the reader.  In this scene, Dante and his guide Virgil first enter Purgatory. Their mission is to climb a mountain with seven terraces where each terrace is meant to cleanse you of a deadly sin. While climbing the terrace of wrath they meet a soul of a man once known as Marco. Due to the blinding smoke in this terrace, Dante asks Marco for directions and to hear his story with the hopes of advising other men to avoid falling into the same sin. First, Marco argues that “the world is blind” because “you living ones continue to assign to heaven every cause, as if it were the necessary source of every motion.” In other words, he considers mortals blind for believing that Heaven controls and preordains everything. He argues that this is foolish because “if this were so, then your free will would be destroyed, and there would be no equity in joy for doing good, in grief for evil.” With this understanding, the entire judgment system of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise would break down because no one can be blamed nor faulted for their actions. Instead, Marco goes on to say that heaven “sets your appetites in motion - not all your appetites,” and that man depends on a “greater power and a better nature…outside the heaven’s sway.” We know this power as God. And so he rightly concludes that if our present world has gone astray, humans—and their ability to manage or abuse their appetites—are to blame.

Marco then continues this argument by contemplating creation. He argues that God made the soul simple and unaware, like a child, but also that the soul gravitates towards what gives it joy since “a joyful Maker gave it motion”. Since the soul runs after whatever it perceives as good, it needs a guide or rein to “rule its love”, and so Marco turns towards discussing the nature of law. He argues that law is necessary and that a ruler is, too, but then shifts towards criticizing the ruler of Dante’s day – the Pope. 

The laws exist, but who applies them now? 
No one-the shepherd who precedes his flock 
can chew the cud but does not have cleft hooves;

and thus the people, who can see their guide 
snatch only at that good for which they feel 
some greed, would feed on that and seek no further.

Marco accuses the Pope of chewing and contemplating on Scripture, but does not have cleft hooves – in other words, he does not recognize the need for separation of church and state in a political leader. Marco blames the leaders for setting a bad example for the flock, and laments how the people have followed suit by following their greed. He concludes that it is misrule that “has caused the world to be malevolent”. Rome, which once made the world good, used to visibly distinguish the world’s path to glory from that of God’s, but Marco concludes that “each has eclipsed the other; now the sword has joined the shepherd’s crook; the two together must result in evil”. In other words, he argues that the Roman Church has now mixed up two powers which should be separate, and because of this dilution, the entire society sinks into degeneracy. 
​
Times have changed since Dante wrote this masterpiece. Marco assumes that the people believe that heaven preordains everything, but nowadays this is not the case. In fact, the opposite seems to be true – people strongly value and praise their sense of free will. Our generation seem to be the fulfillment of Henley’s implied prophecy in his poem “Invictus”– our generation holds themselves the ‘master of their fate, and captain of their soul’. In an ironic twist, then, we have taken a step forward towards the worldview Marco describes, however, we remain subject to corrupted spiritual authority. I believe this irony stems from our confusion in defining spirituality. Nowadays, many quickly equate good works and self-satisfaction to spiritual wholeness. Anyone whose cultivates this artificial spiritual wholeness is a spiritual leader: Oprah, Dr. Phil, your yoga instructor and the average human continues on the cycle of pursuing spirituality for greed, except now we are greedy for self-reliance, a contentment in ourselves. We desire our own tidy, little bubble instead of seeking actual peace with reality and our existence. It is interesting that in spite of Marco’s words not fitting into this generation, the conclusion remains the same. 

Telling Truth to Kings (Us)
By Jaeyoung Lee

In a time where #alternativefacts and #fakenews are running amok in social media and politics, I couldn’t help but laugh a little when I saw the title of Reinhold Schneider’s work, Telling Truth to Kings. Oh boy, I thought. This better have some good fodder for anti-Trump rhetoric. I dove in.
    One of the first things I noticed was how simple the language was. The narrative, too, was quite clear-cut; Bartolome de Las Casas, who spoke out against the inhumane treatment of the Native Indian population by the Spanish, was the protagonist, while Dr. Ginés de Supelveda, who argued for the growth of Spanish colonization, was the antagonist. King Charles V stood as the judge between the two debaters, the obstacle the characters must overcome in order to realize their goal. And as in any traditional literary work, there was a climax, this time in the form of an impassioned jeremiad from Las Casas to the King of Spain:
    “Like unto the Saint, they should have carried the Lord across the sea on their shoulders, but they carried Satan instead. God does right if he destroys the might of this land. Terrible punishment follows terrible crime!”
    By the time I was done reading, the moral of story was very apparent: to fear God and be courageous in the face of worldly forces. The folky retelling of the debate between Las Casas and Supelveda had a moralistic charm which resonated very closely with Schneider’s own struggle with the Nazi government. 
    But its literary simplicity belies its profound relevance to today’s Christians. The lesson seems obvious, but it’s arguably one of our biggest stumbling blocks: that God comes before politics.
    Before Bartolome de Las Casas begins decrying the atrocities of colonization, he begins with a call to center the debate to God’s will. He asserts, “What we must agree on is… simple: how to follow the command of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for all men, and how to work for the extension of His kingdom without overestimating our own strength or underestimating the power of the Lord.” This may seem like a formality, an appeal to the Christian audience, but it is far too eloquent and sincere to pass it off as one. He takes a step back and places his concern in the spiritual light, which may feel almost counter-cultural to contemporary American Christianity. How common is it to hear Christians on TV and social media first take a political position, and then slap on God’s badge of approval? How many times have U.S. presidents, whether be it Donald Trump or Barack Obama, sprinkled a “God Bless America” after a speech that had nothing to do with the Christian God? Las Casas is a rarity in his Christ-centeredness.
    Not to worry; there is a character many people can relate to, and that is Dr. Supelveda. Of course, most Americans these days would not be on board with legitimizing a system of slavery, but his line of reasoning still rings true for many people. He claims that “measures which are designed to bring about [the good of Spain] serve the Faith.” It makes sense; many would argue that a score one for humanity (or country, or cause, or political belief) would be a score one for God. This sort of thinking lurks everywhere, whether it involves a political election, a humanitarian cause, a debate on race, gender, and sexuality, etc. Too often, one’s secular political belief is projected onto God in order to gain the higher moral ground. As Lincoln says in his Second Inaugural Address, “both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” If God is being held hostage as man’s intellectual pawn, what is the point of calling him an All-Powerful God?
    So instead of feeling empowered to criticize Trump (which by now, is not a unique activity by any stretch of the imagination), I felt like a hypocrite. I was doing the same thing Trump has been doing, which is using his nominally Christian identity to bolster his political statements. Unlike Las Casas, and very much like Supelveda, I subjected God into my own belief system. Therefore, the “king” I need to tell the truth to is not Trump. That “king” is me.

The Joy of Selfless Love
by Mayukh Bhadra

​“There was clearly nothing to do but sit down and cry. So Della cried.” 

Well, love was the key foundation in Della and Jim’s togetherness and this restlessness of Della on Christmas eve, not being able to procure a gift for her beloved, prompts her to sell off her most prized possession, her beautiful hair. Jim sold his goldwatch to buy a set of combs for Della – this whole story of ‘The Gift of the Magi’ is a tale of sacrifice, love and overcoming poverty and helplessness with generosity of heart. The action of these two young sweethearts in compliance with the wise Magi who endured and braved pain and sacrifice to travel far and wide to bring Gifts to Jesus reinstate Einstein’s saying “everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted”. Actions of pure love stem from a deep sense of fellow-feeling and passionate joys of sacrifice which in fact bridges the gap between human souls with selfless devotion and leaves little room for generating a metric to measure and count this constant pursuit of the human soul to care for a different person. 

The Shakespearean quote “It blesseth him that gives and him that takes” is the central theme of human civilization where the joys of giving, out of love and care, are so profound and deep. Mother Teresa, the embodiment of God living in a human soul, could have spent the average life of a European woman, with a decent job and easygoing life but instead, she devoted her life for the service of the poor and downtrodden sections of the society – she set an example how God manifests His divinity in the form of a blessing we all carry, dormant in most of us – to heal the world around with eternal sacrifice. In the act of giving, expectations of holding back and receiving are absent and there lies the whole beauty of the act of parting with whatever we possess. 

Jesus’ observation (in 21st chapter of Luke’s Gospel) of the poor widow putting in two small copper coins in the temple treasury leads us to appreciate how she “has put in more than all the others”. She did not have great wealth to pour into the temple but what she parted with could have saved her one meal’s worth but this is how she expressed God’s grace – in the silent joys of giving. In society around and pieces of literature, as old as the Vedas, the human heart is a symbol of joyous abundance, where ‘gifts’ are not defined and measured by the means or the colossal amount of material wealth but the desire to part with, and shower love, be it out of what we call charity or simple affections for the beloved. 

Today’s Google doodle honours the upheaval task Abdul Sattar Edhi took upon his own shoulders to run hospitals, homeless shelters, rehab centres and orphanages across Pakistan. God’s divine love transcended beyond religious borders to bring out the selflessness that resided in his heart – the selfless dedication and love towards the distressed and needy -portrayed and symbolized by Jesus in his lifetime, to address the call of mankind. Now, how can one assess one’s own inclination towards generosity or selfishness? In verse 50 of the Nobel prize-winning, little book Gitanjali, Tagore depicts a situation where a poor beggar comes in hope to meet the king of kings and collect valuable wealth in the form of royal gifts. However, to his utter dismay, the golden chariot stops, the king comes begging and with hesitance, the beggar hands him a little grain of corn. At the day’s end, the beggar is shocked and in tears to see a little grain of gold in his bag. Not being able to part with the materialistic, worldly possessions we have, however scarce, often puts a limitation to our selfless acts and we forcefully shut down the door of God’s passage to our hearts, for He resides and manifests Himself only when we cultivate an abundant environment of love in our hearts.

The old gentleman, in “Two Thanksgiving Gentlemen” feels the joys of paradise while treating Stuffy with a hearty Thanksgiving meal while he himself is starving for days. Even though he ends up being in a hospital, without food and suffering from ill-health, he feeds Stuffy, only to have felt the joys of giving. Here again, sacrificial love is reflected for an unknown person, with whom there are no ties and relation in daily life. The call from within, the urge for embracing another soul with the warmth of love we possess is truly a realization and expression of God’s dwelling in the human being. 

While lying wounded in the battlefield, Sir Philip Sidney gave his water to a wounded, dying soldier, saying “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” These little, otherwise insignificant instances of sacrificial love truly echoes the divine and universal moral law – “it is faith receiving redeeming grace from His willing hand.” The central theme of Christian faith resides on a strong foundation of enduring self-sacrifice and the profound joys of selfless offering –

“What I’ve received as mine on a blessed moment –
In sweet surrender giving them back –
They shall again become gifts of mine ;

Sweet surrender, O all embracing surrender.
I must give all, O Lord, give I must –
Know I this much - all that is mine – give I must.” 

By Samantha Seto 

         The Modern Christian poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins, has literary merit in his works as well as a

good authority that is mindful of spirituality. Hopkins studied the classics at Balliol College of

Oxford University and became Poet Laureate and stands in seventh place of all English language

poets which include William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, W.B.

Yeats, and William Wordsworth. Other major poets who studied religion include T.S. Eliot and

W.H. Auden. Hopkins focuses mainly on thematic religious nature pertaining to sanctity,

redemptive suffering, and heroic virtue.

         Hopkins’ verse is entirely religious due to the fact that he is a pious, devout Catholic convert who

has great faith and later became a Jesuit priest. He came from a family of moderate Anglicans. The

powerful, intellectual Christian poetry allows Hopkins to lead a legacy and has influenced

contemporary poets such as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. It is critical to point out that Hopkins

was passionate about theology. His excellence is evident in his lifetime. Hopkins became a priest

and joined the Society of Jesus, a religious order. His priestly vocation also impacted his poetic

identity. He had compassion for religious matters and devoted his life to God and sacrificed in

order to serve others. Hopkins became spiritually dedicated as a Jesuit priest to honor and praise

God. After Hopkins read “The Wreck of Deutschland”, a tour-de-force poem about a German ship

wreck of the Deutschland, he began writing once more in a trajectory that arises from silence into

greatness. The power of imagination and literary technique or skill may have caused Hopkins to

produce good works. Hopkins’ emotions and intellect rested in poetics rather than prayer. He

focused on his works and gradually intensified with poetic talent and genius.

         The prolific literary work gave promise to the achievement of writing excellent religious poetry.

Hopkins’ poetic works were inspired by his faith and interest in sacred beliefs and texts in order

to lead him to create divine themes. Similar to the Book of Psalms, Hopkins writes of the divine

glory of God’s creation. Hopkins had a religious devotion in addition to scholarly ambition that he

was profoundly able to pursue. Hopkins became a professor in Greek literature at University

College, Dublin, and Fellow of the Royal University of Ireland. Yet, he realizes that his faith

separates him from his family and the Oxford community. He must overcome a true internal

struggle of the choice to believe in God, but not be greatly accepted by other scholarly persons in

society. Thus, he clearly led a life of sacrifice.

         In the poem God’s Grandeur, Hopkins describes a world that is filled with God’s divine presence,

power, and grace. The natural world is God’s creation. According to the Book of Genesis, God

created all things on earth. He made humans out of the dust in his own image. Therefore, it is

critical that humans respect the good creation of the earth that God has blessed all with. Hopkins’

poem provides a spiritual force of divine hope that is given to God’s creation. The morning that

sheds light onto the earth is a metaphor for God’s intent for the clarity of the intellectual human

mind. The Holy Ghost is one of my favorite references to the Holy Trinity in the last line of

Hopkins’ Petrarchan sonnet that states “world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”

(24). The imagery of the Holy Spirit transforming into a white dove is a very compelling point and

pleasing image. In contemporary society, great suffering exists and people tend to disregard a

Heaven that is present after one’s life on earth. Hopkins suggests that humans treat the world with

no love for the beautiful things that God has granted to us such as our desire for nature or learning

in academia. The Holy Ghost watches over the world as we know it and provides security and

comfort to the real life in God’s creation.

         As a star of writing, preaching, and scholarship, Hopkins was always driven to a state of perfection

in his spiritual faith and intellectual mindset to create works. In terms of Hopkins’ poetry, he did

not use the conventional elements of English verse. Instead, the brightest mind of the time emerged

from the roots of Christian and English poetry and invented his own poetic works with his own

creativity, musicality, and art. Hopkins’ expert use of language and love for spiritual devotion to

God were combined to make very remarkable works.

Tolstoy’s Moral Dilemma
By Joseph Bae 

​       “How much land does a man need?” As he explores this question in his short story of the

same name, Leo Tolstoy describes the life of Pahom, an impoverished peasant farmer with an

insatiable desire for more property. Beginning with a declaration that more land would satisfy all

of his needs, Pahom takes on debt, moves his family, and ultimately dies in order to incrementally

gain more real estate over the course of the story. Throughout this time, despite the increased

property he is able to amass for himself, Pahom consistently remains discontent and hungry for

more. In the end, manipulated by the Devil through his own greed and dissatisfaction, Pahom

dies attempting to purchase 13,000 acres of property rather than the 1,300 acres he can safely

gain.

       Through Pahom’s story Tolstoy desired to warn the reader of the evils of greed and a life

dedicated to the pursuit of wealth, yet a slight change in the narrative might have achieved just

the opposite. Imagine that rather than continue to seek more and more, Pahom remained

satisfied with the already substantial property of 1,300 acres. Then Tolstoy would have told the

story of a penniless farmer with no land of his own who, by his own hard work, frugality, and wit,

was able to amass a large amount of property and wealth for himself and his family. Rather than

dissuade a reader, such a tale might inspire one to emulate Pahom.

This interpretation of the story is imperfect, but useful in identifying a more nuanced

reading of Tolstoy’s message. Pahom’s actions may be evil or they may be good depending on

the perspective with which one views them. However, I believe that what Tolstoy condemns are

not Pahom’s actions but the motives and premises underlying them. It is greed that is evil, not

necessarily the pursuit of more land.

        At what point then does the desire to increase one’s ability to provide for themselves and

their family become greed? Tolstoy paints a picture in which Pahom’s desire for more land places

him under the influence of Satan from the very start of the story. Prior to his attempts to

purchase more property, Pahom was able to live a reasonable life with his family, and in that

sense did not need more to survive. In a way, a reader can then infer that simple subsistence is

the threshold Tolstoy sets for what one may morally acquire. This view takes the word “need” at

a very literal level, but it is also an interpretation that seems too extreme and removed from

reality to be practical. Instead, perhaps the line that separates greed from acceptable acquisition

of possessions is set elsewhere or simply not well-defined at all. Debates have been waged

throughout history between the likes of Plato, Locke, Marx, and countless others in order to

determine what morally and justly can be considered private property, and have yielded no

definitive conclusion. There likely will never be one. Therefore, we each must individually do our

best to discern what we believe to be the point at which upward economic mobility gives way to

greed. In other words, how much land does a man need?

By: Ben Costello 

​George Fredrick Handel’s oratorio, The Messiah is one of the most instantly recognizable and universally beloved pieces ever written. I’d like to provide a very brief reflection on why this piece is so enduringly popular. The Messiah is a piece both literally and figuratively tied to resurrection. First performed on Easter Sunday the piece always was intended primarily to be performed for Easter despite the fact that in contemporary society it is nearly always considered a Christmas piece, with scores of performances of the Hallelujah Chorus every December. In fact the piece is really about Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. It was also the piece which figuratively resurrected Handel’s career and cemented him as one of the greatest masters of composition every. The secret to the incredible power of the music lies not so much within its method of telling a story through sound: in fact, there is very little narrative or story in the music or text. Rather, Handel chose to create a piece which was essentially a long reflection on Jesus the Messiah. Thus all the Bible passages he employs give very little information about the actual life of Jesus. Handel’s music and text focuses mainly on emotional effect. Where other composers use a technique known as “word painting,” where they illustrate musically particular words, gestures, and phrases in the text their music accompanies, Handel essentially did not. This allowed him to combine text which he had personally selected (and which thus reveals his own feelings and emotions and thoughts about Jesus and his life) with music which captures the emotion behind the words. Where the text speaks of the weight of Adam’s sin which Jesus himself bears, the music is heavy and somber, but it does not try to match the exact words through word painting. Likewise the music which accompanies the largest section of text, the Resurrection-related passages, gives little expression to the nuances of the words, but instead abounds in joy, triumph and excitement. Handel’s music then is primarily an expression of the emotions underlying the text and the emotions that he himself felt. These are the emotions which have led to people becoming Christians after hearing the profound power of the piece. The endurance of The Messiah almost 300 years after it was written seems to stem not from the theological depths it probes, but from the pure display of emotion, writ expansively and clearly by Handel. The piece relies on the way in which Handel wrote immediately arresting music that captures the effect that Jesus’s life had and continues to have. Handel’s success at hinting at the life story of Jesus while reflecting on the effect of that story in music has not only cemented him as one of the greatest composers and The Messiah as one of the most popular pieces ever written, but has generated one of the most affecting and inspiring works for Christians and non-Christians alike.

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