What is College For?
A few days ago, I received a group email sent to the surviving members of my undergraduate college class announcing—boasting—that the class gift from our sixtieth reunion had been the primary contribution for a golf training facility at Rutgers University. A photograph of the plaque honoring our support accompanied the ... Read More
A Bendel Bonnet, A Shakespeare Sonnet
What do a Bendel bonnet and a Shakespeare sonnet have in common besides rhyme? Throw in Mickey Mouse. No, it’s not a riddle manqué or a question rejected by the Miller Analogies test. As many probably know already, these are just a few of the superlative attributes applied to the ... Read More
Pinboy
Mine was a career option knocked out from under me by mid-twentieth-century technology, not the silent artificial intelligence that threatens many occupations today, but a clanking contraption of gears, pulleys, and mechanical grippers that made human hands unnecessary. In my early teens I had worked several nights a week as ... Read More
Needles’ Eyes, Wealth, Learning and Virtue
How do those who claim to be Christians today reconcile the modern world’s quest for material gain with Jesus’s severe injunctions against riches? Most notably in verses 10:25-26 of The Gospel According to Mark: “But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that ... Read More
Fear of Heights
The magnificent tree that we had admired for our more than twenty years in this house is now a stump after a week-long process of devastation, men with chain saws dangling from ropes in the upper reaches, the heavy thuds of dropping branches. It had been our favorite tree in ... Read More
My Father in the Attic
Among the clutter in our attic, unpacked through the twenty years since we moved into this house, rests a large framed photograph of my father taken when he was twenty-nine, or so I’ve been told. That photograph, about twenty-four by eighteen inches, leans against a beam, shrouded in black plastic ... Read More