Following up on my earlier article, “Tradition for Innovation,” Faith and Leadership at Duke has just published my new article, “The Gift of Constraints.” The article is a take on the new Barnes Foundation building in downtown Philadelphia, reading it as a kind of material allegory or parable for leadership lessons. As you’ll see from the…
We all know that children imitate their parents–for good or ill. So, given my practice of annotating texts, it shouldn’t have surprised me that our then-toddler son Grayson thought an open book (in this case, Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another) was an invitation for inscription. Notice that he has already mastered the “layering” principle, utilizing two…
A friend of mine who is also a doctoral student recently asked if I had any sort of system for how I annotate books, particularly primary texts. It was an interesting question, because annotating books is certainly one of the central practices of my scholarly life–and yet it’s not something I was ever explicitly taught,…
[Apologies for the radio silence over here at Fors Clavigera. To be honest, a lot of my energy has gone to Twitter, which I have found to be a delightful experiment so far. In fact, the essay I link to below grew directly out of a Twitter exchange with Andy Crouch! (You can follow me by clicking the…
The inestimable Byron Borger pointed to a recent feature in The Guardian: “The 10 best…closing lines of books.” All of them are a treat, but the closing line from Eliot’s Middlemarch (a book, incidentally, that I think is instructive for contemporary discussions about science and religion) deserves to be highlighted (and is too long to be…
As someone who has written extensively about the formative power of “secular liturgies,” you might think I’d be primed to analyze the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics as an example of just such a “secular” liturgy. In other words, you might think I’d be sympathetic to George Weigel’s critical analysis of the opening…