Integrity Last month I was honored to receive the Personal Integrity Award from the Delaware County Committee for Integrity Enhancement for my work with Alcuin Study Center. While I, personally, am not a paragon of integrity (though I try), Alcuin Study Center is an institution founded upon it. Though we often think of integrity as … Continue reading May 2025
Category: Blogs
This page is host to a growing number of blogs, essays, and other collections of words.
Annabeth Elston, class of 2025 In the Fall of 2021, I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the Fall Retreat of the Christian Campus House at Ball State. I spoke on Christianity and the arts. Annabeth was a freshmen at that retreat. The daughter of a visual artist and a musical theater major, … Continue reading Spring 2025 Student Spotlight
Student Engagement This Semester College Students Love Writing Letters! (Who would've guessed??) We've been setting up a table once a week in one of the large dinning areas on campus with handmade paper, ink wells, and fountain pens and then inviting students to sit down for a moment and write a letter to a friend … Continue reading April 2025
Two Poems and an Essay Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike Make no mistake: if he rose at allIt was as His body;If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,The amino acids rekindle,The Church will fall.It was not as the flowers,Each soft spring recurrent;It was not as His Spirit in the mouths … Continue reading Anticipating Tomorrow
By Brian Allred It’s easy to get sucked into the drama of an epic showdown. You can think old school like Luke Skywalker facing Darth Vader in Star Wars, or Rocky Balboa squaring off against Ivan Drago in Rocky IV (or perhaps you prefer his bout against Clubber Lang in Rocky III). More recently, there’s … Continue reading The Pain of Nain and the Hope of Easter
Cicero supposedly once said, "Times are bad. Children are disobeying their parents and everyone is writing a book." Today, we might change the last clause to "everybody is making content." Content is that non-descript term for everything from bad dad jokes to dash-cam wrecks, from panda and capybara videos to apologetic arguments (that last one … Continue reading Alcuin Recommends • March 2025
by Brian Allred Broken cities, broken schools, broken laws, broken bodies, broken bones, broken vows, broken marriages, broken homes, broken dreams, broken spirits, broken hearts. To quote the title of a 1989 Bob Dylan song: everything is broken [1]. Does that capture how you feel sometimes? Even if you’re a bit more of an optimist … Continue reading Fixing What’s Broken: Insights from Isaiah 59
i thank You God for most this amazingday:for the leaping greenly spirits of treesand a blue true dream of sky;and for everythingwhich is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birthday of life and of love and wings:and of the gaygreat … Continue reading February 2025
or...When Our Own Sin Startles Us Sin doesn't always have the effect that it should. Sometimes our callous hearts are oblivious to our transgressions and we go on with our day, impenitent. This is especially true in our sins of omission versus our sins of commission—that is, when we don't do what we should rather … Continue reading To the Delta Fan in Front of Me at the Delaware County Boys Basketball Tourney
The God We Hardly Knew by William Willimon (copyright 2001 The Plough Publishing House) Probably most of us have had the experience of receiving, right out of the blue, a gift from someone we really don’t know all that well. And, perhaps, to our consternation, the gift turns out to be nice, something that we … Continue reading Christmas Meditation