One of my favourite poems by Seamus Heaney is this one from his 1991 collection Seeing Things. This poem is the eighth in the first section (Lightenings) of Part 2 (Squarings). viii The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the …
Patient: Do you think I have low self-esteem? Therapist: No, it’s about right. How do we know whether our own evaluation of ourselves, and of our lives as a whole, is accurate or justified? How can we tell if we’re genuinely living a good life? MacIntyre (2016, p. 222) makes the bold claim that at …
A day after submitting my blog post (The Good Life of the University) to the Teaching Matters blog team, I happened on an interview (2012) with MacIntyre in which reference is made to an essay of his (Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices) which appeared in an edited book called Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions (2001). …
Link to post on Teaching Matters blog: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/teaching-matters/the-good-life-of-the-university/ Introduction Study with us for an extraordinary future, says the University of Edinburgh’s webpage. But what kind of future does a university education promise – one of personal growth, or merely a means to an end? Universities themselves rarely address this question. When they do, their response …
Alasdair MacIntyre (2001) ‘Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices’, in Robert E. Sullivan (ed.) Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 1–21. While the essay is most obviously about Catholic universities, MacIntyre makes clear that all universities can learn from some of the Catholic writers who have written about …
I spent an hour or so with a student from Vietnam this week. I could tell from her accented English she was likely to be Vietnamese, but she was quick – keen even – to let me know. In fact, she began our tutorial by explaining that she was attending this writing tutorial because English …
It has become commonplace to describe all sorts of phenomena in positive terms. Take the word community. It is often applied to any group of people with something vaguely in common, however thin or ill-defined that thing might be. To call such a group a community immediately suggests coherence, shared recognition, and solidarity. Curiously, the …
I found my way to this poem via Malcolm Lowry who used a line from it for the title of his book: Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid. The verse that contains that line includes this most remarkably dark image: Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade; Or your sad branches thicker …
Some Personal Reflections on the Pre-Sessional (Phase 2: Induction + Weeks 1–3) A pre-sessional programme is an academic English course designed to help students develop their language and academic skills before starting a university degree. At the University of Edinburgh, the programme is run by English Language Education (ELE); the six-week phase (Phase 2) includes …
Alasdair MacIntyre (2006). The end of education: the fragmentation of the American university. Commonweal, 133: 18. In this short article about the American Catholic university, MacIntyre makes several claims about both Catholic and secular institutions in the USA. Perhaps the most provocative is in the opening statement: from a Catholic point of view, the contemporary secular …
