Blog

Reclined on my large, red, comfy, couch, I was reading, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. I was enjoying the read, and then I got to #14, entitled “Joy Is Such a Human Madness.” In this section, Ross wrote about a student in his class, Among the most beautiful things ...

When asked, “What was Muhammad’s moral character like?” Aisha replied: “His moral character was the Quran.” Students encounter this hadith at two moments in the introductory course to the study of Islam. The first is when students meet the Prophet Muhammad through hadith literature, the written record of sayings ...

A while back I read an interesting, if not somewhat problematic, book called Hunt, Gather, Parent. The author, NPR science reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, went all around the world, along with her young daughter, trying to learn how people parent. She noticed that, in many other places, children seem to be ...

I was born and grew up in the hills of east Tennessee, in the Appalachian region of the United States. As a child, I didn’t realize that where I lived had a reputation in other parts of the country. I also didn’t know that I had an exceptionally ...

One exercise that has sustained me throughout these last three years of a global pandemic has been writing letters to my Beloveds. As a child who was always on the move, inhabiting la frontera, physically and intellectually, writing to friends in my home country was a way to remain grounded ...