I’ve just started my 45th year teaching at Berklee, and, with 50 years in front of classrooms (earlier teaching stints at Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame) someone might ask, “Isn’t that enough? When are you going to…

Since the spring of 2017, I have been developing a Liberal Arts course that I call, “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: Identity and Expression.” I added the “Identity and Expression” at the urging of my students, who thoroughly enjoyed the discoveries…

Racism is rampant and unspoken, denied and obvious. In a country of diverse terrain, we nonetheless remain connected via media, social utterances, and responses to certain events. It is easy to say “I am not a racist” or to believe…

Feeling blindsided, baffled, or just bewildered, Americans are asking, How did we get here? New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat likens the experience of observing Republican dysfunction to seeing “a calf born with two heads…watching something that the laws…

One of my favorite poems- and has been since I was a child- is “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe. This poem illustrates, perfectly, what I call the Danger of Reading the Single Book. It was…

Today sitting at the top of skyscrapers with smart boards projecting the profits of the future, we believe ourselves to be at the peak of human existence. One is tempted to believe that the amazing progress made by the human…

As I sat in class listening to my professor read from the Upanishads’ description of the ‘imperishable,’ I became increasingly frustrated that it was more a non-description than a description, filled with non-descriptors and negations. The ‘imperishable’ was unquantifiable and immeasurable. ...