In the opening lines of his preface to The Metalogicon, translator Daniel D. McGarry invokes Horace’s enduring admonition to writers:
If ever you write anything, keep it to yourself for nine years, for what has never been divulged can be destroyed, but once published it is beyond recall.
McGarry,
Reflective Commentary (2025)
At the time of composing this essay in 2014, Richard Wilbur stood in his ninety-fourth year. I had mistakenly thought that he had already passed, but he was very much alive, a fact Professor Robert Woods gently noted with the hopeful remark, “He is still alive at
What follows is a book review I wrote shortly after completion of doctoral work which was published in the Journal of Faith and the Academy 10, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 104.
Book Review
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and Civilisation. James Stourton. New York: Knopf, 2016. xvii + 478 pp. $35.00.
The keynote address for incoming doctoral students at Freed-Hardeman University, titled On Being Scholarly, was delivered by Dr. Shawn D. Mathis, PhD, on May 13, 2018, in Henderson, TN.
You are a scholar; these are your fellows.
Individually, you are scholars. A scholar is one given to serious academic inquiry.
Reflective Commentary (2025)
Looking back at this essay more than a decade after I first wrote it in 2014, I see how my thinking about "wasted time" has changed. When I wrote this as a doctoral student, leisure, contemplation, and intellectual growth were seen as important. Now, the
Reflective Commentary (The Modern Wall—Media Saturation in 2025)
Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 on October 19, 1953—seventy-two years ago, but who’s counting in decades when the man seemed to write in centuries?
Was he a prophet? Or something else; something we don’t quite have a word
