Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.

Exciting news: Jeffrey Stout will give a series of Gifford Lectures this May 1-11. Entitled “Religion Unbound: Ideals and Powers from Cicero to King,” the lectures will “trace the ideal [of ethical religion]‘s history and explain how its defenders have defined and criticized religion.” Follow the lectures (they’ll stream live) on the Gifford Lectures site.

I’m very proud to have helped edit one of the essays that became this book, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature, while I was managing editor of Victorian Studies. The essay, “Wild Charges: The Afro-Haitian ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’,” was among my favorite of the many, many critical essays I read in the course of my graduate studies.

Krista Tippett’s conversation with Anil Dash is a classic—one of my On Being all-time favorites.

The indignity of Minnesota winter: when you drop a glove & then, upon stopping to pick it up, kick it full of snow.