“The ambient aunties (a great band title) were just there somehow, with their cars to collect me, their homes to go to, their abundant baked potatoes, their surprise trips to the cinema, their wooden jigsaw puzzles, and their benign curiosity about my life…https://sarahendren.com/2024/11/28/ambient/
I’ve been baffled by the success of cookie chains in recent years — their products are about on par with grocery store slice-and-bake processed crap — but then I realized they’re a knock-on enterprise arising from legalized weed.
Hitting a new low of discouragement about the widespread use of chatgpt among students, so if you’ve got links to frameworks, insight, even-more-creative assignment design, do please share.
This is my annual arrival-of-winter reminder that even if you don’t have ice cream in the house, there’s a good chance you have the makings of cinnamon toast for dessert.
My husband Brian edited and produced his latest Frontline production, airing tomorrow: China, the U.S., and the Rise of Xi Jinping. Eventually I hope Brian will teach a new generation of documentarians this craft: rigorously fact-checked, meticulously translated, deep-dive histories. Recommended.
Came to NYC for a fancy uptown symposium, but it was a much bigger thrill getting to see Maryhouse on a sunny cold Saturday. A bag of fresh bagels was hanging on the fence outside.
For beauty to be on the same footing as truth and goodness, it has to be constitutive of the real, not just downstream effects from the “really real” of truth and goodness: sarahendren.com/2024/11/2…
“As if I too could body forth His Heaven”: so much beauty-truth-goodness in this lecture by Malcolm Guite (via @mathewbattles)
Curious if fellow profs here have favorite books or articles about academic writing for new PhDs, generalizable across fields. Frameworks, exercises, generating what I call “fortified questions” etc?
I watched this terrific tribute conversation on Dorothy Day, and then I checked out what my hero Paul Elie is up to lately. A new book on art in the 80s! I hit pre-order so fast.
My daughter is an illustration editor for the school newspaper this year. Her latest.
“[Dorothy] Day’s ideas were never refuted, just misrepresented, overplayed, and then left for dead in media res, another half-built cathedral, surviving on a thread of memory and the steel of committed disciples and friends… sarahendren.com/2024/11/0…
“Is God? and Which is God? are questions on which everything hangs. To say this is not to prejudice the answers — perhaps they are No and None — but it is to rule out treating the subject flippantly, as akin to astrology or alchemy.” sarahendren.com/2024/10/3…
Great to see this partnership for ethics in engineering education — seems substantive.
“You could be the CEO of a company devoted to feeding the world, spend your life developing the Food-o-Matic which can feed everyone on the planet, but if you neglect to care for your kids, then your kids just have to live with your neglect.” sarahendren.com/2024/10/2…
I swore not to use Notes in Substack, thinking the Twitter-like UI would soon make the feed like its predecessor (despite early folks saying “gosh, it’s so nice here!”). I was, alas, correct — the dumbass dunks and oversharing and general smugness have fully taken over.
The last two weeks of class held field trips, and today, after a proper synthesizing seminar discussion, students said to me: thank goodness we’re back together to talk about all we’ve read and done! They like field trips, they said, but they crave conversation. My heart, she bursts.
Among the many treasures in the tactile museum at the Perkins School for the Blind this week, another field trip with students: architectural and technical models, animal heads and vertebrae, silk flags, maps. What a piece of history that institution is.
The big path and the small path: sarahendren.com/2024/10/1…
I’m the Myers Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Humanities and Civic Engagement this year at the University of Scranton, one of the Jesuit institutions that’s newly on my radar! I’ll be lecturing, visiting a bioethics class, and speaking to a local high school group as well.