Mark Schwehn

The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing. --Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird” Aging and diminishment are not synonymous. There are hundreds of books and essays about aging,…

Perry Glanzer’s Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education is a sequel to his earlier 2022 book, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity.Perry L. Glanzer, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity (New York, NY: Rowan and Littlefield, 2022). Dismantling offered…

Perry Glanzer begins his ambitious and stimulating book with a story that is both uncannily prescient and deeply disturbing. He tells us that the impetus for his work dates from the 1990s when he spent an extended period of time in Russia and Ukraine studying post-communist moral education. Again and again in Russia, teachers confessed,…

This article first appeared in Current. Love of God and neighbor are at stake in the battles over liberal learning  In his journal entries for September 8 and 9, 1960, the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton explores the importance of “being able to rethink thoughts that were fundamental to people of other ages, or…