That is the basic question the second paper for my Religion in Latin America class gets at. Once the day this paper was turned in passes we’re ¾ of the way done with the Fall 2011 term already. Seems quite odd as it feels like we only recently began.

The book I’m currently reading for my Tragedy, Passion, Sacrifice course is The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. The book is Doctorow’s commentary on the executions of the Rosenberg’s during the Cold War through a fictionalized story told from the perspective of one of the children of the couple. For my last comment of the term we had to find any academic article to help make some amount of sense out of Doctorow’s comments on the Cold War.

The title of this post is the basic question we had to answer in our second essay for my Women, Men and Peace course. It discusses if the basic assumption that women are more peaceful than men is both actually the case, and then if it is if those differences are because of nature or nurture. There isn’t much more I can say here regarding this essay beyond pointing you to the essay itself, it’s only three pages so you have no reason not to read it if you’re intrigued by the topic.

I just turned in the second paper for the English class I’m taking this semester. The texts we were to draw on for this paper were The Great Gatsby and Passing. Ultimately we were suggested to write a paper that compared these two books in order to generate a theory of what both books mean. I focused on how one main character from each book were similar to inherently compare the books to one another. The characters I compared were Gatsby (from The Great Gatsby) and Clare (from Passing). As the title of both the paper and this blog post suggest, the most compelling evidence I dug up about the similarities between these characters was in regard to friendships they had. As such, the meaning of these books I inferred was along the lines of telling us something about friendships (but you’ll have to read the paper to find out exactly what lesson the books can offer us).

Food is a key source of energy for any living being. Aside from a decent amount of sleep (at a bare minimum 6 hours per night for us humans) food is the only other source of energy our bodies get on a daily basis in order to function as expected. It is for these reasons that I applaud the organizers of the annual Blog Action Day for choosing food as the topic for this year.

The food we eat shouldn’t highly tax our planet, that is, eating local food is better than eating foods from another continent. Why? Because transporting that food across the planet tends to have minor side-effects on our environment in the form of emissions. Eating local foods isn’t just sustainable when it comes to the environment. It is also sustainable when it comes to our local communities. Buying local food will send the money you spend on food to local farmers, so what small amount more the food is will be offset by the fact that you’re supporting families much like your own, and keeping the money in your local economy.

Aiming to be sustainable in where and how an individual or family gets their food is a simple task. But in retrospect its the larger institutions, like hotels, college campuses, hospitals, etc. that have a larger challenge when it comes to sustainable food. In these places you’re easily dealing with hundreds, even thousands, of people yet the same basic layer of the importance of sustainable foods. There are many aspects of these issues to deal with, and it truly is a complicated puzzle. In my case, as with my fellow Johnnies, we can know that to an extent Saint John’s is considering these issues, but we’re one small spot on the map of these institutions who all need to commit to sustainable foods (and other sustainability measures) in order for our planet to have some relief from the burdens we place it under. Plus, sustainable foods are ultimately going to be healthier for us.

As a longer-term assignment for my Women, Men and Peace course we’ve each been researching someone that falls into the boundaries of the course content to write a short biography paper on. I chose to do Mother Teresa for my biography project partly because she both fit the assignment’s frame and I have family members who actually met her. As I did my research I continually felt like strands of what I was reading were interconnected with family history in some ways. Logically that makes zero sense, but it served to make working on this project much more personal and not entirely academic. That said, even if just because it happened to be the first academic assignment for which I checked books out of our library, it still had solid ties to academics. This was a fun project to work on over the past couple weekends, but I’m glad that it’s finally done and can live out the rest of its existence available to everyone from my website. Questions, comments, or concerns regarding this project can be directed to me if you have them.

After reading The Coquette we had to write a formal comment to help determine the meaning of the book. I focused on what the book may tell us if looked at through the perspective of the mother of one of the main characters. I hope you enjoy reading my perspective on this old, interesting, novel.

The title of this post is shared with the paper I just turned in for my Religion in Latin America course. The segment of this course my paper went along with was one where we looked at how Spanish clergy converted the indigenous populations of the America’s to Christianity. As the title suggests, our task within this paper was to judge how appropriate those methods truly were.

In a nutshell that is the question upon which I derived my thesis for the paper I had to write on King Lear for my English course. The paper itself serves as all the commentary necessary on this topic. I hope you at least enjoy, even if you disagree with, my paper.

That is essentially the question we had to answer in our first essay for my Women, Men and Peace course. This essay assignment was in response to Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. I’ll let you read the essay to see what my answer is. Though it may be a sensible extension none of us in the course are actually donating $250.00 in the directions our papers describe.