About four years ago, on a late April afternoon, I found myself racing through Dahlgren Quadrangle when I saw two students sitting on a bench. As I got closer, I recognized them as seniors who I had once...
Artistic works rendering the process of conversion and transformation are often externally dramatic – be it Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul or Flannery O’Connor’s Revelation.
While such...
Many of us have received that phone call, or that text or email: the one that comes unexpectedly and bears news that we did not want to hear.
The illness, or even the death, of a loved one. The loss...
One of the most challenging things for a professor to do is to design a truly meaningful and transformative final exam or final paper. Yet, after 21 years of experience in higher education as both a student...
During this challenging winter, I often returned to the final lines of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind:”
“The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
The...
I met Nancy on my first night at Georgetown in August 1984. I had moved into my room on New South 1 (which looks very much the same today) and wandered anxiously over to a party on the Harbin patio.
I...
A proverb tells us, “God writes straight with crooked lines.”
When I look back on my 48-year-old life, I celebrate satisfying successes and reckon with painful regrets and losses. I try to draw...
I’ve been on the road a great deal this academic term, a temporary inhabitant of the terminals in various cities on the East Coast, the West Coast and sites in between. In those journeys it has become...
What makes a Jesuit education different? Over the years, I have heard many efforts to describe the unique chemistry of a place like Georgetown. Last week, though, I heard one that was genuinely new for...
Now that the add/drop period has come to a close, we enter a different phase of the semester. The slow, “Georgetown 3-4-5” start is reaching its finale (we had three days of class the...
With graduation just over a month away, seniors are wisely looking back and trying to make sense of it all. Such reflection is very Jesuit — reflecting on one’s experience to discern its meaning.
Memory...
A number of recent retrospective evaluations of Pope Francis and his first year as the leader of the Catholic Church have attempted to discern what the influences of his personality and style of leadership...
