Archives: Newsletter Post

In his article about joy and engineering, Cameron Kim, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Biomedical Engineering and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University, reminds us that curiosity and joy are integral elements to learning. Read more.

This spring, Tana French published her tenth novel, The Keeper.  I read my first Tana French novel almost 20 years ago. It was her debut, In the Woods, that would become part of a series of six murder mysteries—the Dublin murder squad. I picked it up off a table at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill […]

When Anna McEwan arrived as dean of the Orlean Beeson School of Education at Samford University in January 2020, she inherited a vision statement promising to graduate students who were not only professionally competent but also people of excellent character. Her first question to faculty cut straight to the gap between aspiration and practice: “I […]

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 […]