Archives: Newsletter Post

Charlotte McConaghy is a writer of rare atmospheric power, able to render landscape and grief as a single continuous thing, so that you cannot quite say where the weather ends and the mourning begins. The novel belongs, for me, to a growing body of work wrestling with what it means to love a world that […]

Each semester at Radford University, students from courses across the university gather in the Artis Center for a conference-style showcase unlike most academic events. They come not to receive grades or hear lectures, but to present original solutions to some of the world’s hardest problems: climate change, food insecurity, homelessness, democratic erosion. Students, community partners, […]

In his foundational article, Robert A. Emmons, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of California, Davis, provides a road map to understanding the psychology of joy. He writes, “joy offers a fuller and richer portrait of a person’s capacity to live a life of purpose, meaning, and value, or an experience of “elation of right relation” […]

I received Steve Garber’s Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate (2026) as a birthday present this month and promptly began to devour it. Garber is a beautiful, lyrical writer able to interweave a wide range of personal, artistic and scholarly insights. Garber has the distinctive talent of making the reader feel […]

In her welcome letter to the latest issue of Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing, Suzanne Shanahan invites us into a conversation about joy. Read more.

A common refrain in education at every level is simple: pay attention. Hidden within this practical command is a transcendent truth: that, as Simone Weil stated, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” and the precursor to love. As advances in technology have monetized attention, there can be a temptation for the conversation […]

“…the best portion of a good person’s life is the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.“ Last week in a seminar, a student asked what might the world be like if we were all just 10% kinder, more humble, more generous, more grateful?  What if we were all 10% better humans? The question was […]

In this article, Rosalyn W. Berne, the Anne Shirley Carter Olsson Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Virginia, welcomes us into a conversation about how students are thinking about their futures as engineers and the decisions they will make as they enter the job market. Read more.

It’s Saturday on a farm outside Tempe. A math major and an English major from Arizona State University are weeding a row of carrots and chatting about where they grew up, while two students from the school of business are turning a compost pile nearby. Afterwards they gather with the rest of the student volunteers […]

“She wasn’t used to lying to anyone but herself.” I have a holiday ritual where I read the Booker Short List between Christmas and New Year’s. Indeed, it is a family tradition. So come January, I often focus on well-reviewed new books that might be a bit lighter but which still have strong, captivating narratives. […]