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Lose Not Your Beating Heart
Dear Friend, “Response is my strategy. Endless responses.” Shocking Statistics I spend a lot of time talking with my students about the three rhetorical appeals for argumentation, ethos (credibility/authority), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic). It’s especially important to consider the use of these three in relation to your audience and your purpose, or what we’d…
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To Be Found in the Openness
Dear Friend, “What does it mean to want a thing to change, but then feel bullied by that change?” Big Little Lies There’s a stumbling block to conversations about race, which I mentioned in my first reflections on 9/9. This is that our perceptions of life and reality are deeply personal, and so even issues…
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To Call Forward a Yearning
Dear Friend, What If? ‘How does one say / what if / without reproach?” (5) Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation begins with a poem titled, “what if.” The tone sits on the edge of exasperation and determination. As she mentions in the next chapter, Rankine is motivated to talk to white people, especially…
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Justice not Just for Us
Dear Friend, My first experience with Claudia Rankine was reading Citizen: An American Lyric. In my review for that collection, I wrote, “Rankine’s genius is in the slow building momentum of her work, the kind that meets us where we are at the beginning and builds with us as we take in more, as we…
Contemplative Reading Project 