Benjamin J. McFarland

In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, the character Lucien keeps a library of “every story that has ever been dreamed … novels their authors never wrote, or never finished, except in dreams.”Gaiman, Neil. "Season of Mists, Vol. 4." The Sandman (1992), p. 40. One shelf, presumably that of British authors, holds The Return of Edwin Drood by Charles…

In the space of about a year, three big trees fell in middle of the Seattle Pacific University campus. All of these were close to the Tiffany Loop, where we hold an “Ivy Cutting” graduation ceremony under the canopy of branches every June (when weather and pandemics permit). Each time a tree fell, I’d remember…

In the first part of this post, I discussed the pressures academics face with a very literal metaphor: the pressure of the atmosphere all around us, intensified in the spring break (or “spring broken”) times of scarce resources. I also proposed that, in some elusive way, the universe is open to God’s power, perfected in…

“Spring break” is a misnomer for faculty and staff at colleges on the quarter system like mine. One of my colleagues calls it “spring broken.” Most quarter systems require you to fit the latter two-thirds of your academic year into the first half of the calendar year. This compresses the time between Winter and Spring…

On Friday, March 6, 2020, at 4:05pm, our Vice-Provost sent an email that the remaining classes for Winter Quarter were cancelled at Seattle Pacific University due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Classes wouldn’t meet in-person until September, and even then in a distanced and hybrid teaching model that continues to this day. Seven separate emails sent…