Diligently Seek

Dear Mom and Dad,                 You did not fail. I know with what emotion and commitment you look upon the issue of the truth claims of Mormonism, because I have felt them also. You must feel that I am more than leaving a religion. I imagine it feels like I am leaving the family, rejecting your parentage, and abandoning your values. More than anything in my life I love my family and I intend to live in such a way as to prove that. Fully, emphatically, and undeniably I love you so much.                 My new philosophy and lifestyle are not repudiations of any person, least of all you two. I did not leave because I began to sin, or because Dani and I started to have problems, or because of any personal tragedy. I am not mad at The Church, or at you, or at God. All I have done is utilize the best possible mechanisms for seeking...

                    Jasper Dent is a teenager on the verge of adulthood. He has a girlfriend, a loyal best friend, and a loyal group of adult supporters including the town Sheriff and his teachers. Such normalcy is contrasted, however, with the fact that he has been raised by the most notorious serial killer in the world: Billy Dent. Barry Lyga’s novel I Hunt Serial Killers is an intense thriller that deals with coming of age and the many nuances, some of which are horrible, that attend it. Through Jasper “Jazz” Dent young readers can learn an important lesson about how the human mind works, and how “good guys” and “bad guys” are defined.             The novel opens with the discovery of a dead body. The reader is given a sort of long distance perspective on a crime scene investigation taking place. Jazz observes the investigation through a pair of high-tech secretive b...

                Cracked.com is a comedy website. It is low-brow comedy to boot, but I believe that in recent years the website has undergone an incredible change. The site employs all kinds of writers who specialize in just about every topic imaginable. They publish editorially selected articles from freelance writers also. One can learn about nearly everything at Cracked.com. They have a sports writer, an astrophysicist, a martial arts expert, many pop culture guru’s, several graduates of theological seminary, and political science experts. More important than any of this, however, is the fact that they are all hilarious. All of them are hilarious, and the best of them have gotten together and written a masterful book that can teach young adults incredible things about a variety of important topics.             There are many sections that deal with the development of science. On...

        Family relationships are special. Across cultures and backgrounds – throughout time – the constant that those with whom one shares blood and with whom one shares a home, are special and to be treated affectionately is constant. When an author endeavors to portray that affection, and especially when an author endeavors to question it, the result is radical. To demonstrate that this is true, one might take recourse to two playwrights from different time periods to see if their themes and the reaction of their audiences are similar. Euripides, from 480-406 B. C. E and Arthur Miller from 1915-2005 C. E. both discussed the theme of family, and questioned the role of gender in family rearing in their plays Medea and The Death of a Salesman .             Finding similarities between these two plays may seem difficult. Medea utilizes her own genius, chemical expertise, and exploitation of her husband’s as...

Oneself is there. Perhaps there is no better reason to describe why William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark has such an emotional impact on viewers and readers. Across all demographics, languages, and time since it was first performed people have passionately loved Hamlet . Reasons why have plagued critics for centuries. It is almost impossible to discover a clear moral or overarching philosophy in the play, much less one that would resonate so permanently with humanity. There is some magic in it that fully realizes what Shakespeare identifies as the purpose of plays: “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her/own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body/of the time his form and pressure”  (3.2.20-22) . That mirror shows us ourselves. We love the play because we can empathize with it. That personal touch can only be interpreted through the lens of the personality that produced it. It is by recourse to William Shakespea...

        Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the worlds”  (Shelley, A Defence of Poetry 918) . His point was that poets crystallize the ideas of an age, and effect the movements of civilization. It seems that is only half of the story though. Poetry certainly does influence change, but it is also influenced by other movements. Throughout history this symbiotic relationship between poets, and the artistic periods they write in has been evident.             Poetry during the Renaissance, for example, was just as interested in a resurgence of Greek and Roman artwork as was painting. Francis Petrarch exhibited this impulse in certain of his sonnets, such as sonnet 78 from his Rime Sparse , in which he appeals to the mythical artist Pygmalion, who fell in love with his own sculpture, saying, “how happy you should be/with your creation, since a thousand times/you have...

        There is an apparent discrepancy concerning the economic impact that the plague years had leading up to 1381 and the year of the Peasants’ Revolt. It can be difficult to determine whether the plague caused the cost of living to increase or decrease if one depends upon an uncritical acceptance of contemporary sources for one’s interpretation. Complaints about increased prices and impending financial ruin are just as plentiful as statements about the lower cost of livestock and food. To resolve this apparent discrepancy one must evaluate these sources to determine in what ways the cost of living increased and decreased. This leads one to the conclusion that what became more expensive in the post-plague years leading up to the Peasants’ Revolt was the maintenance of the pre-Plague differences between the nobility and the laboring class. It was more expensive for the nobility to maintain their leisure lifestyle, and it was less expensive for the peasants to...