Beatrice Marovich

Aug 31, 2024 | beatricemarovich.substack.com | Beatrice Marovich

MY FALL SEMESTER started this week, on Monday. It will be my 9th year at the college where I teach; this is the 9th time I’ve gone through the ritual preparations for the first day. But it feels qualitatively different from the previous eight, and not just because I’m older and wiser. It feels like there’s something different in the air. I can sense the faint aroma of artificial intelligence everywhere I go. It stinks a bit, at least to me.

May 27, 2024 | academic.oup.com | Holly Ordway |Oxford Academic |Beatrice Marovich |Kevin Hart

While J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and other creations enthrall readers through immersive adventures and captivating characters, a deeper understanding of the author’s faith unlocks a new dimension of appreciation. Tolkien declared his works “fundamentally religious and Catholic,” but their subtle nuances often escape surface-level readings. Delving into his faith journey unveils crucial threads woven into the very fabric of his narratives.

Feb 10, 2024 | academic.oup.com | Vanessa Sasson |Beatrice Marovich

THIS is a wonderful quotation from Gadamer. If you want to understand it, you have to want to understand it. At first reading, it seems trite and obvious, almost a cliché. It is only when you try to think it through—when you acknowledge the inadequacy of your first reading and ask not what position this person holds in your classificatory structure but what reason this person might have had for shaping their sentence in these words, that you see how beautifully it exemplifies what it is saying.

Jul 10, 2023 | religiondispatches.org | Beatrice Marovich

The Republican Party’s primary race is filling up with candidates crusading against “wokeness,” particularly in the American educational system. Meanwhile, here in Kentucky (where I live), a rural school district will be forced to reform its anti-discrimination policies after a federal Department of Justice investigation has uncovered “serious and widespread racial harassment” in the school system, targeting Black and multiracial students who live in the county.

Apr 25, 2023 | religiondispatches.org | Beatrice Marovich

The recent Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the FDA’s approval of mifepristone presents itself—in the typical pattern of antiabortion politics—as a form of protection. The suit alleges that the FDA failed to properly assess the safety risks of the drug, as if the point of the suit were to protect the pregnant people who take the drug. But as politicians like Mike Pence have made clear, the health of people who take the drug isn’t really the concern at all.