Sharing our Blessings with Those in Need

Each year, National Hunger & Homelessness Awareness Week asks us to think about our most challenged neighbors during the days before Thanksgiving. As we consider our own reasons to be thankful, let us ask ourselves how we may share our blessings with those around us in need of food and shelter. [excerpt

Entertaining Angels: Homelessness and the Hospitality of Faith in Adams County

I first volunteered at a soup kitchen in the frigid depths of winter in very late 1981 or very early 1982, in the heart of the Rust Belt in the midst of a terrible recession. I should emphasize right from the onset that I didn’t want to be there: I was next to useless and very intimidated, forced to be there by the tradition of service at my all-boys Catholic high school. Still, the experience made quite an impression on me, and I tell that story to my students so that they will understand that I know what’s like to be afraid of homeless people. When I looked at the people in line I saw a hungry mass clamoring for food—a collective threat—rather than a great number of struggling individuals in need—my brothers and sisters I was called to love—and that was my mistake. It’s a common enough error, however, and if there is one great irony about the fear in American society of the stereotypical homeless person, it’s that very many people who find themselves suddenly homeless are, themselves, terrified of homeless people; they’ve been conditioned to be so, and finding themselves in the midst of other homeless folks can seem like descending into a nightmare. [excerpt

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching of the Anglo-Saxon Cult of the Cross

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers of undergraduate Old English to develop ways to impart some transferable skills and modes of critical thinking to unsuspecting students. [excerpt

State Funding Unfair to Traditional Schools

The present budget crisis in Pennsylvania has brought many lingering tensions to bear as school districts scramble to pay their bills without any support from the state. Notably, there has been a lot of talk about holding back payments to charter schools, which naturally sparks controversy. In order to make sense of the situation - and in order to understand the passionate debate which surrounds it - it\u27s worthwhile to know something about the history, theory, and funding of charter schools. [excerpt

Speak Free or Lie: Academic Freedom & the Obligation to Speak Truth

In recent days a colleague in the Political Science Department at Gettysburg College has been pilloried in the local and national press for her stand on teaching the upcoming presidential election. It troubles me that much of the criticism levied against her seems disengaged from the text of her original column on the subject, or from the ample evidence of excellence in her long and well-respected career; it horrifies and disgusts me, however, that she has suffered through epithets and threats to her personal safety for simply voicing a thoughtful, heartfelt opinion, however provocative or controversial. I firmly believe we should protect and indeed celebrate respectful dissent and unpopular speech. [excerpt

These Kids Today

National Volunteer Week, an annual challenge and opportunity for all of us to engage with our communities, is April 6-12 this year, and recent data suggest that this could be a good opportunity to re-commit ourselves to rising to the many challenges these communities currently face. [excerpt

Productive Destruction: Torture, Text, and the Body in the Old English \u27Andreas\u27

Writing in the Old English Andreas is at once both a productive and a destructive activity. We first become aware of the dangerous power of the written word quite early in the poem, when we learn that the Mermedonians have subverted the normally productive activity of writing into a tool for calculating the execution dates of their prisoners (134-37). Later, the words uttered by the devil to incite the Mermedonians against Andreas illuminate the lexical relationship between the destructive nature of writing and the productive nature of torture in the semiotic context of the poem. Finally, in a sort of double-subversion, these same Mermedonians are the agents by which the destructive practice of torture is itself transformed, as they write upon Andreas\u27s body his identity as a type of Christ. It is precisely this analogous relationship between production and destruction, between inscription and infliction, between the act of writing and that of torture and the transformative powers bound up in each practice which I will explore in this paper, focusing on how Andreas\u27s body ultimately serves as the page upon which this multivalent (and seemingly paradoxical) text is written. [excerpt

A Dereliction of Duty: Homeless Veterans in America

U.S. government efforts to help homeless veterans in America are not enough. When I first began grappling with homelessness issues in my local community quite a number of years ago, Dave, then-director of the local homeless shelter in our small town, told me a story that illustrates some of the special circumstances faced by homeless veterans in America. Dave said a community of homeless vets had based themselves in caves in the hills outside of town, and after one was stricken with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized, his ongoing recovery left health care providers with a thorny dilemma. Clearly, the man was ready to be released from the hospital, but they were loathe to send a recovering pneumonia patient to his home in the caves. [excerpt

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Died Today. Or, Maybe, Yesterday; I Can\u27t Be Sure...

50 years on, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead continues to captivate and to entertain audiences with its darkly comic examination of existential themes of life, death, and indecision drawn from the pages, situations, and characters of Hamlet. First produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the play opened at the Old Vic in London in 1967, and has been reprised there this season to rave reviews, with none other than Harry Potter in a leading role

A Lost Generation

America is in immediate danger of throwing away a vast number of our young people; these are kids who have fallen through the gaping holes in our social services net and have landed on our streets. They roam this country by the thousands in search of simple necessities such as food and a warm place to sleep, often trading their bodies in exchange for the most basic of human rights. In the words of Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing at the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, DC, there is a dire need for more shelter beds for homeless youth. In fact, we are in danger of producing another Lost Generation, and the process is fueled by our own apathy, neglect, and lack of decisive action. Furthermore, it is a damning testimony of abiding intolerance in our society that LGBT young people are wildly disproportionally represented among homeless youth in America. [excerpt