-
I’ve spent the last few weeks in the first four books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the longer I’ve stayed there, the more a question has nagged at me, the kind a student asks after class once everyone else has left. If Aristotle is right about how people become good, what do we do with…
-
The best writing advice I ever got came in two parts. First: if you want to be a writer, write. There is no way around the daily embarrassment (I mean habit) of it. Second: find a writer you love and steal from him or her until you find your own voice. Imitation first. Originality later,…
-
I was eight years old when my life as a miscreant began. My family had stopped at a gas station on the way home, and I had run inside to use the bathroom. As I was walking out of the store, my gaze was stolen by grape-flavoured Bubblicious gum. I picked up the pack, coveted…
-
When I was twelve, I learned that profanity was “just words.” Or at least that was the argument a friend and I had heard and decided to experiment with. We climbed up into a tree in the park and yelled every forbidden word we knew. The tree was important! It put us safely above the…
-
Raising children is “super easy,” said no parent ever. At the moment, our family is navigating high school decisions, possible paths after graduation, learning to drive, school sports, and sports outside school. That is only a partial list. Our days are full, although “drowning” may sometimes be the more honest word. In the rare quiet…
-
When I hear the word poetry, I picture a slim book, a carefully broken line, and perhaps someone in a black turtleneck looking pained beside a microphone. In my early 20’s, I was this person…probably looking more pained than I actually intended. Aristotle would find that category far too small…and would also be pained by…
-
The Quiet Crisis of Value In our age of algorithmic nudging and “post-truth” discourse, we are often haunted by the suspicion that our moral compass has been replaced by a mirror. We treat objective value as a phantom, preferring a “subjectivist solvent” that reduces every truth claim to a mere matter of personal preference or…
-
It is a rare treat to dive into the deep end of the “sovereignty of the self” with a student before they head off to the university “jungle.” Recently, I’ve been reading through Nietzsche with a Grade 12 student who was eager to tackle the heavy hitters before her first year of university. I have…
-
We live in an age of unprecedented cognitive surplus, yet we are haunted by a singular, hollow paradox: we have more information than any generation in history, but less “drive” to do anything meaningful with it. We are masters of the digital scroll, experts in the irony of the meme, and sophisticated deconstructors of every…
-
I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog talking about the “Wise Imagination”—the muscle we build when we read deeply. But there is a common misconception that the goal of a “baptized imagination” is simply to make us “nicer” or more “empathetic.” In our era of hyper-polarization, empathy is marketed as a universal panacea;…