Vocation and the Student

One of the clearest and most incisive indictments of careerism (though he never uses that specific term), was made by W.H. Auden in a speech, “Vocation and Society” to undergraduates at Swarthmore.

James Sutton | Swarthmore Peripateo | Fall 2018-Spring 2019

Reading a Liturgy of Confession: Liturgy as Forma Formans

The form worship takes reveals has certain assumptions about how people learn built into it. Reading liturgy from a formalist perspective, one that pays attention to form, reveals much about what those assumptions are.

Caleb Molstad | University of Minnesota Between Cities | Spring 2019

Let us Love and Sing and Wonder

How did hymns come about and how have they changed through history? Why were they significant and how are they relevant today?

Richard Ibekwe | MIT et Spiritus | Spring 2018

Searching for the Ear of God

I myself reckoned with the reality I faced: I also thought prayer was sort of stupid. It certainly felt stupid, primarily for two reasons.

Jesse Rines | The Hopkins Dialectic | Spring 2017

Metaphysics in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot

The question of the purpose of poetry as such is not simply academic or theoretical, but is grounded in understanding how poetry can and ought to relate to contemporary culture.

Nicholas Westberg | The Wheaton Pub | Spring 2016

When in Doubt: The New Testament’s Veracity

When we say the Bible is “God-inspired,” “God-breathed” or “God’s Word” what do we mean? If it does not contain Jesus’s words, is it God’s Word? Is the New Testament verbatim of God? I thought it was.

Kelsey Waddill | The Hopkins Dialectic | Spring 2017

Created to Creator

I encountered Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem “Pied Beauty” last fall, clasped in the pages of a green and white anthology. I immediately recognized its beauty; it is a playful thing, quick-witted and high-spirited.

Kate Massinger | The Harvard Ichthus | Spring 2016

Augustine Collective Alum Obasi Shaw ’17 Awarded Honors for Rap Thesis at Harvard

Entitled “Liminal Minds,” the album combines such influences as Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper and Geoffrey Chaucer to portray contemporary black life in America. Shaw is the first in Harvard's history to submit a rap album for the senior thesis project.

Augustine Collective News | Augustine Collective | Spring 2017

The Diabolically Ridiculous

I assert that up to this point I have made a strong case for why the devil is ridiculous and tragic, but from my description, he does not sound very evil.

John Nystrom | Cornell Claritas | Fall 2016

The Dilemma of Faith in a Secular Age

Likewise, ours is an age in which believers and non-believers alike struggle with doubt about whether our beliefs are indeed the right ones.

Micaela Walker | UC Berkeley TAUG | Spring 2016

The Real and Ideal in Keats’s Odes

Keats was disenchanted with the ideal world of the “supernatural, art, the mind, and the past,” but “the tone of these last poems makes clear that nature suffices.”

Anna Tipton | The Wheaton Pub | Spring 2015

The Trial of Images

This “physicality” is the key, I think, in understanding the core difference in the way one of the methods is iconic and one is idolic.

Stephen Westich | The Wheaton Pub | Spring 2015

On “Love III” by George Herbert

Love is gentle and kind, quietly observant of the persona’s hesitancy, and his questioning is not interrogative but “sweet."

Judith Huang | The Harvard Ichthus | Spring 2015

Why Apologetics? An interview with David Skeel

Rather than assuming that most people hold loosely Christian views, or trying to demonstrate that non-Christian views have no foundation, I focus on how Christianity explains the world as we actually experience it.

Nathaniel Schmucker | The Dartmouth Apologia | Spring 2014

Affliction Furthers the Flight in Me

Inspired by the story of the resurrection, 17th century English poet George Herbert wrote his short poem “Easter Wings.” The poem beautifully recreates the restorative power of Christ’s resurrection.

Chih McDermott | The Williams Telos | Fall 2013

Poetry and the Redemption Story

We are not academics searching to excavate truth from a divine treatise. Instead we are beings intimately woven into a poem in which God tenderly shows us what to love, how to love, and why we love.

Siqi Cao | The Columbia Crown & Cross | Spring 2014

A Papal Perspective on Community

Pope Francis has made much news, in particular, because of his unique approach towards religious and non-religious communities around the world.

Tony Farias | Swarthmore Peripateo | Fall 2013

Remember November

While researching for this article, I ventured into internet forums to read what others who have considered suicide have written about their suicidal feelings, and found my sentiments echoed. Many say that if just one person cared it would make them go on living, or that they have been hurt by those whom they love.

Linda Kang | UPenn Common Subjects | Spring 2013

Grasping for Grace: The Strangeness and Difficulty of Faith in T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”

Instants of intellectual ecstasy are close to what the Romantics meant when they contemplated the Sublime, which Edmund Burke classified as the “strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

Danielle Charette | Swarthmore Peripateo | Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2013

Eliot’s Early Poetry and the Search for a Saving Faith

In the three years of reverberations from “The Waste Land,” Eliot still struggled with the same problem, as well as the same solution. He was dissatisfied with despair but simply could not find a better response.

Will Hogan | The Dartmouth Apologia | Fall 2012

On Reason in Milton’s Paradise Lost and John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” – Theologies on Agency in Christian Faith

Milton states, “reason is but choosing”; reason depends on a person’s free will to be utilized for either man’s pleasure, or God’s glory.

Trina Hyun | The UPenn Lamp Post | Issue 1, Spring 2012

Surprised: Wordsworth on the Coexistence of Joy and Sorrow

William Wordsworth wrote this sonnet two years after the sudden death of his four-year-old daughter, Catherine, but in it he grieves as though not a day has gone by. When he cries out in misery, “How could I forget thee?” it is both rhetorical – indicative of how deeply he loved her – and guilt-stricken, having in fact let her slip from his mind.

Inez Tan | The Williams Telos | Issue 4, Fall 2010

December 2019