Blog Stats
- 2,739,133 readers since June 2008
Recent Comments
- Pandora on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Pandora on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Pandora on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- xgenx on Free Will Objectivism Fail: Two Mathematicians Demonstrate that Ayn Rand’s Philosophy is Incoherent
- Naomi on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Naomi on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Graduate Degree Seeker on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Graduate Degree Seeker on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- v on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- v on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- BThis on Adam Smith and Capitalism for Beginners
- BThis on Adam Smith and Capitalism for Beginners
- Cliff Wonderalt on Bart Ehrman: Liars Wrote Parts of the Bible
- Amanda on Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- notabilia on Woke Fanatics? Essentialists vs. Nominalists
Top Posts
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- What is an Etiological Narrative? And Might Confusion About Its Nature Be the Source for Fundamentalist Religion?
- What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- What is a Human, Really? Thinking about Definition via Aristotle
- Who Is Stephen Greenblatt? Why Should You Care?
- Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- Hegel for Beginners
- Rhetoric, Critical Thinking, and Checking Your Premises
- "The Vision of Christ That Thou Dost See": William Blake on the Many Faces of Jesus
- This Hans Holbein Painting of Christ after Crucifixion Sparked Fyodor Dostoevsky's Imagination
-
Recent Posts
- Woke Fanatics? Essentialists vs. Nominalists
- A Mini-Course In Rhetoric For Writers. Concept 2.10: Emerson’s “Circles”
- A Mini-Course In Rhetoric For Writers. Concept 2.9: Imitation And Emulation With An Eye On Competition
- A Mini-Course In Rhetoric For Writers. Concept 2.8: Selection And Editing
- A Mini-Course In Rhetoric For Writers. Concept 2.7: Audience And Rhetorical Strategy
Recent Haiku Tweets
- AOC says it well. twitter.com/CNN/status/108… 10 months ago
- nytimes.com/interactive/20… 1 year ago
- RT @mrchan: So much has changed in America, and yet so much hasn't https://t.co/x2mthUr4Kc 1 year ago
- Perfect. twitter.com/newsundayheral… 2 years ago
- RT @goldenglobes: At tonight's #GoldenGlobes we honor Hollywood legend Meryl Streep with the prestigious Cecil B. Demille Award. https://t.… 2 years ago
Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson
Who Thinks Your Thoughts, Weird Kangaroo?
Who are you, really? Neuroscientists tell us our gut microbiome consists of 100 trillion organism with different DNA from what we inherited from our parents, and that those microbes are connected to our brains via the vagus nerve. Thus those … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged cyborgs, Emily Dickinson, eugenics, hybrids, life, love, philosophy
Leave a comment
Foxy Sex vs. Hedgehog Sex: Free Will, Edward Feser, and Evolution
Thomist philosopher Edward Feser has a curious way of defining free will and what it’s for, writing in a recent blog post the following: “[O]n the conception of free will as ‘freedom for excellence,’ which is endorsed by Aquinas, the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged edward feser, Emily Dickinson, evolution, gay marriage, philosophy, sex, Thomas Aquinas
Leave a comment
Vivian Maier: The Emily Dickinson of Photography
I’m super interested in seeing this documentary.
If Emily Dickinson Wrote a Facebook Profile
Emily Dickinson (poem 288, c. 1861): I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you–Nobody–Too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise–you know! __ How dreary–to be–Somebody! How public–like a Frog– To tell one’s name–the livelong June– To an … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Emily Dickinson, facebook, life, peacocks, poetry, profiles, selfies
Leave a comment
An Interview with Charles Hood
__________ Poet and photographer Charles Hood’s most recent book, South x South, based on a trip he made to Antarctica in 2011, has just been published by Ohio University Press (2013). Jordan Davis, poetry editor of The Nation, writes the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, authors, books, Emily Dickinson, life, literature, poems, poetry, travel
1 Comment
The Tao of Emily, the Calm of Lao Tzu, and Trouble from Blake
Below are two couplets of flower power yin-yang from Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine,” written in 1850 when she was aged nineteen. Insofar as anybody knows, it’s the first poem she’d ever written … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, Buddha, Buddhism, Emily Dickinson, Lao Tzu, literature, poetry, Tao, William Blake
Leave a comment
Emily Dickinson’s Poem, “My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun–“
I’d like to offer an existentialist interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s famously perplexing poem, “My Life had stood–A Loaded Gun–” (poem 754 in her collected works). Here’s the poem: My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun– In Corners–till a Day The Owner … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged death, Emily Dickinson, existentialism, God, life, Loaded Gun, poems, poetry, Terror Management Theory
9 Comments
Social Butterfly Becomes a Submissive and Hijab Draped Caterpillar
The Protean nature of the self (that is, the water-shifting nature of the self, from the ancient Greek sea god Proteus) is on disturbing display in Katherine Russell, the widow of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Here’s The New York … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, Boston Marathon bombing, Emily Dickinson, fundamentalism, God, hijab, Islam
1 Comment
Getting a Handle on Kant’s Distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime
Contained in Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) Critique of the Powers of Judgment are his reflections on beauty and the sublime. Beauty, writes Kant, can be defined as something that is good in itself that pleases the eye; it is absent any utility … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged beauty, Emily Dickinson, Kant, monsters, philosophy, psychology, sublime
4 Comments
The Farthest You’ll Ever See
NASA recently released the below Hubble image. It’s a high quality (2 million second) exposure of deep space galaxies, the most distant of which are 13.2 billion light years away. What you’re seeing is not our time, but the universe … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged astronomy, Emily Dickinson, galaxies, Huckleberry Finn, life, NASA, night sky, space, telescopes
1 Comment
Are you a member of the faith community—or the doubting community?
Because every other year or so I teach the Bible as literature course at my college, I was asked to be on a panel discussing how to deal with religion in the classroom. The event was held last night and one … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Abraham Lincoln, agnostic, apologetics, atheism, atheist, doubt, Emily Dickinson, faith, Jesus, religion, the doubting community, Thomas Jefferson
7 Comments
A Fresco Painting from Pompeii Paired with Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom Window (and One of Her Poems)
A bedroom fresco? Whose bedroom? Source: Spiegel And here’s Emily Dickinson’s bedroom window: Dickinson’s bedroom was at her family’s Amherst homestead. Emily’s room was on the second story of their home. Here’s one of her poems: I felt a Cleaving in my … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged bedrooms, defamiliarization, Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson's bedroom, Emily Dickinson's bedroom window, Italy, love, poetry, Pompeii, Rome
2 Comments
Are you a person of doubt or a person of faith?
Of course, you might be someone in between: a person committed to certain beliefs in excess of the empirical who nevertheless carries them, not with the triumphalism of certainty, but with the cross of doubt. But I nevertheless think that these two categories—the person of doubt and … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Abraham Lincoln, agnosticism, agnostics, atheism, atheist, doubt, Emily Dickinson, faith, Jesus, persons of doubt, st. thomas, the doubting community
6 Comments
Is America a Christian Nation Founded by Christians?
No. Key players in the founding of America—such as Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin—were not Christians. They were Deists and religious skeptics. And other icons of America’s cultural history—people like Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson—were agnostics with a lot of emotional ambivalence toward … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Abraham Lincoln, apologetics, christian nation, Christianity, Emily Dickinson, God, James Dobson, Jesus, memes, the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine
21 Comments
Was Emily Dickinson an Atheist?
In the December 2009-January 2010 dead tree edition of Free Inquiry (on pages 47-48), Gary Sloan, a retired English professor, did an interesting investigative piece on Emily Dickinson’s relationship to religion. I thought his conclusion quite delicious (because it mirrors my own relationship … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnosticism, atheism, atheist, Christianity, Emily Dickinson, God, God the Father, John Keats, percy shelley, Shelley
5 Comments
Does Emily Dickinson Call Herself “the only kangaroo among the beauty” in One of Her Poems?
No. But she does in one of her letters. In Emily Dickinson’s letter (dated July, 1862) to Thomas Higginson, a chief editor of The Atlantic Monthly, she writes this delicious, somewhat erotically suggestive, and arguably even naughty, paragraph: Perhaps you smile at … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged australia, Emily Dickinson, kangaroos, masochism, poems, poetry, poets, sexy
1 Comment
An Emily Dickinson Poem
Emily Dickinson’s “Much Madness is divinest Sense —”: Much Madness is divinest Sense — To a discerning Eye — Much Sense — the starkest Madness — ’Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail — Assent — and you are … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged eccentricity, Emily Dickinson, life, nonconformity, poem, poetry, self assertion
Leave a comment
Ants Eat a Gecko. 21 Hours. Time. Lapsed.
“Because I could not stop for death . . .” Emily Dickinson would have written a disturbing poem about this: Do you suppose she would have laughed at the ants carting off the skull? There’s something funny about it somehow, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apollo v. dionysus, biology, death, Dionysus, Emily Dickinson, Halloween, life, nature, Nietzsche, poetry, skeletons
Leave a comment
Emily Dickinson on Telling the Truth
And, implicitly, on how to make art: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightening to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, Emily Dickinson, epiphany, life, literature, poetry, truth
Leave a comment
“Good Friday”: A Poem by Christina Rossetti (Published in 1896)
Am I a stone, and not a sheep, That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross, To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss, And yet not weep? Not so those women loved Who … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, Christianity, Christina Rossetti, Easter, Emily Dickinson, Jesus, literature, masochism, poems, poetry, sadomasochism, Santi Tafarella
7 Comments
