Institutional life rests upon deeper intellectual traditions. The essays collected here explore interpretation, classical thought, history, and the humanities, and the conceptual foundations that inform governance, leadership, and authority.
In April 2026, I led a three-part seminar series titled “Leading Change in Complex, Resource-Constrained Health Systems: The Reality of the DRC.” Hosted by the Higher Institute of Nursing Sciences (ISSI), the series brought together healthcare professionals working in conditions that resist easy description. The sessions began, as such things
Among Books
I have walked among books for as long as I have walked among people: on my own shelves at home, in borrowed studies with their faint smell of dust and ink, in libraries stumbled upon like half-hidden wells along the road. None has matched the gravity of the
Cambridge and the Habit of Inquiry
There are certain places where thought seems to linger in the air, as if ideas themselves possessed a kind of afterlife. The courts and passageways of the University of Cambridge are among them. Stone and silence, worn steps and narrow cloisters do not merely
Hermeneutics is often treated as a philosophical discipline—a theory about how we understand texts, meaning, and experience. But this is not where it begins.
Long before it became a theory, hermeneutics was something people did.
It emerged wherever meaning was not immediately clear—where language failed, where cultures met,
Submitted on August 25, 2015, to Professor Ben Lockerd as part of the doctoral course, LIT 7324 Literary Analysis: Great Ideas, Authors, and Writings.
Studies in classical literature, such as Plato's Republic (Book X), Ion, and Phaedrus, Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's The Art of Poetry,
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,
Bradbury, the prophet of a future age, warns that the great peril is not merely the loss of books. Rather, tragically, the peril is the slow erosion of the mind’s capacity to think freely. The danger begins not with fire and censorship. Gradually, with habit and the quiet surrender
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
