Sublime

Charles Segal, a recently retired Harvard professor of classics who taught my Greek Tragedy course, spoke about how the Oedipus trilogy reminded him of Erik Erikson’s three stages of development. In youth, Professor Segal said, a person struggles to figure out who they are in relation to their parents (a real head scratcher in Oedipus’s case). In m

I especially enjoyed the work of Sir John Woodroffe (1865–1936), a.k.a. “Arthur Avalon,” who—while prominently serving as Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in British India—spent his private hours explaining, defending and ultimately practicing in the then widely reviled Hindu religious schools of Shaiva and Shakta Tantrism.

As academic disciplines grew to be more specialized and professionalized, they veered toward insularity and fragmentation. And philology led the way. It was the philologist August Böckh who, in 1812, launched the modern research seminar. Within a decade, the field of philology had begun to abandon traditional humanist concerns with the good life an

I really recommend the plays by Euripides or Aeschylus. They deal with a lot of the essential problems we struggle with even today. In khoros.”