I asked my religion class to write about the appeal of the apocalypse, to use an image or video or song as a way into explaining what they think. Here’s a video about the end of the world by the band Matt & Kim; it’s a break-up song.

I’ve encouraged my students to listen to a conversation recorded last month between President Obama and the writer Marliynne Robinson, whose work we’re reading in class over these weeks—in particular, an excerpt from her novel Home published in Harper’s and an essay she wrote for The American Scholar, “Onward, Christian Liberals.” The second installment of her conversation with the President appears today online. Photo […]

This week in my religion class we’re reading essays by Marilynne Robinson, Francine Prose, and Nathan Schneider (whom I’ve mentioned in this portfolio before). The readings find great accompaniment in a recent conversation about democracy and faith and history between Robinson and President Obama, recorded in Des Moines, Iowa, last month and published by The New York Review of Books. […]

This weekend I’ll be reading D.T. Max’s Guardian story about why it’s a bad idea to “worship” David Foster Wallace as a secular saint. Strange how this story relates so well to both my seminar on Wallace and my religion writing course. The image here is discussed briefly in Max’s story. It’s a painting by Paolo Beneforti.

In my writing class today we looked at images from the poems of Christian Wiman and Edward Hirsch. I asked all my students to find an image they’re drawn to and try to write a description that packs the image with meaning. In his poem “Five Houses Down,” Wiman describes a “wonder-cluttered porch.” Here’s one of those […]

This week in my writing class we’re reading essays and two poems by Christian Wiman, plus a piece of criticism from The New Yorker about his collection My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. Wiman’s poem “After the Diagnosis” describes an apple sapling bent to the ground, observed by the poem’s speaker through “one clear pane” (as he […]

This week in my writing class we read an excerpt from Jennifer Percy’s Demon Camp, “We Kill Ourselves Because We Are Haunted,” published at Guernica. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine contains Percy’s latest, “Meet the American Vigilantes Who Are Fighting ISIS.” Let’s all read. Photo credit: Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times