“You cook?” Lindsey asked on her way out the door. The words pierced my ego, leaving me stunned. But her reaction was justified: during the several months we had been together, I had been too busy to cook. Repertory theatre...

Wunderkammers confronted visitors with objects that were not only curious, rare, and precious, but also informative about their owners: how they viewed themselves and what their aspirations were. —Virginie Spenlé, Savagery and Civilization If you’ve seen any films in the...

Rae Langton (2009)[1] argues that the speech act of pornography constitutes an illocutionary act of silencing women. To be clear, this claim does not center on particular acts of subordination and silencing depicted within instances of pornography, nor on particular...

In Why Not Socialism?, Cohen argues for a particular brand of socialism as a necessary reaction to two moral principles that he believes we implicitly recognize as dysfunctional within a capitalist system. I will argue that a simpler solution is...

The focal question herein is whether the public disobedience recognized as the start of the 1979 Iranian revolution was justified. To assess the justification of the disobedience, I will consider two conditions: injustice and last resort. To assess the uncivil...

A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to the arguments in chapters two and three of Anselm’s Proslogion—at times to the total or near exclusion of the remainder of the work. Even Karl Barth (1960), who asked us to...

I was raised on PBS, which meant I was raised on Mister Rogers Neighborhood. In every episode, after candidly discussing real-world themes like divorce, disability, or racism, the sweater-clad host invited us to follow his little red trolly to the...

Kant left us with a counterintuitive and less-than-savory criterion for the positive moral worth of actions. Phillipa Foot took on the challenge of untangling and making better sense of the mechanisms underlying Kant’s notion. An example raised by Portmore suggests...

It appears to be a common tactic to object to Nozick on the grounds that absent from his argument is any support for the powerful assumption that we possess natural, institution-independent rights. While that objection is my primary conviction, many...

I will consider whether J.L. Mackie’s argument from relativity should undermine confidence in moral objectivism. First, I will briefly reconstruct the relevant points of Mackie’s argument and gloss some of the terms we will use. Second, I will demonstrate a...

Descartes’ well-known proof of the existence of God in the Third Meditations relies on his ability to possess an idea with infinite objective reality. This is a critical premise in his proof; without it, the proof fails. I argue that...

Sliwa (2018)[1] offers a descriptive project about the nature of faith. She hopes to show that faith is a complex mental state requiring both the traditionally recognized doxastic element and a previously unconsidered know-how. She clarifies the latter as knowledge...

Kahan and Braman (2003) propose a reasonable, evidence-based argument for reframing the public conversations and debates about gun control in the United States. They note that mainstream exchanges between the media, policymakers, and other stakeholders tend to focus on consequentialist,...

I disagree with Mark Schroeder’s (2019) claim that anticipated regret (AR) is only intelligible when motivated by our desire for narrative agency in major life choices. I will argue that AR can be rationally formed from past experiences and rationally...

In her book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, Catherine Coleman Flowers (2022) disagrees with Bob Woodson’s assessment that the extreme poverty and associated environmental issues plaguing descendants of racial oppression are “a failure of the civil rights...

In Transformative Experience, Laurie Paul argues that we cannot make a rational choice regarding a personally transformative experience. She offers two primary reasons: (1) information critical to evaluating such a choice is inaccessible until the experience is had; (2) undergoing...

“A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.” -Eric Ries I’ve spent more than a decade working in nonprofit professional theatre as an actor, deck manager, and stage carpenter in what I took to be a...

Several years ago, a friend asked me a very simple question that sparked several years of thought. She was mentioning how she had been dehydrated lately and needed to drink more water. I shared with her my recent discovery (shared...

You know that nightmare in which you show up to school in your underwear? Most of us have dreamt it, but as an actor, I’ve lived it. When I started acting, I developed a belief that “right” meant something solid, the...

How do you keep that drive of yours alive amidst the monotony of daily life? You might enter adulthood all revved-up with the energy and determination of an olympic athlete, dead-set on changing the world for the better, but what keeps you from giving up...

Want to have a long, satisfying and life-changing career in theatre? It’s only going to happen if you ask yourself this one question: why theatre? Before you can figure out what’s leading your character’s actions, you have to figure out what’s...

A painting may be art, but art is not a painting. Clear as mud? Let’s look closer. Art is made up of two parts: the tool and the purpose. If you have just one or the other, it’s not art. Use...

Does our work live on after the final curtain? What remains when the show closes? I used to think working in theatre was like building the card towers I spent hours on as a kid. We devote tremendous amounts of time...

The Barter Theatre’s Mainstage production of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is a wonderfully well done and family-friendly stage version of the much-beloved novel first published in 1868. Al-though primarily written for young girls, it pushed many boundaries of the time by...

Sometimes when I explain my theories about story and how its telling sustains and nurtures society, people retort that stories don’t reflect real life–that they’re usually romanticized versions of life in which the good guys always win and the bad...

There are two categories of artists in every field of the arts. The first—well… Imagine this: At a new job, you’re handed a device that prints buttons (the pin-on kind with graphics and such) and the other workers show you how to...

I am, without hesitation, resolved to spend my life exploring story as an active element in societies and individuals and to chart its threads as they weave their way out of and back into the fabric of human existence—that of...

When you haven’t ridden a bike for a while, you begin questioning just how well you’ll remember. There’s no demo version to ease your mind. Standing there, holding the frame upright in front of you, there’s only one thing you...

This past Thanksgiving, my sister and I took a drive into town while visiting my parents in Virginia. We started plotting the Mom and Dad gifts somewhere in the discounted-fancy-things section at the back of the TJ Maxx, and I...

My first thought is that there’s no way we’re at the end of the year already. I know it’s coming because Thanksgiving is mostly digested, the real winter weather is finally settling in, weekends are spent splitting firewood with my...

Relaxation has become my new favorite challenge. A little over a week ago, I went on as the understudy to Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities at Barter. I had no rehearsal with the cast, except 30 minutes prior to...