"You don't need to do everything. Do what calls your heart; effective action comes from love. It is unstoppable, and it is enough." - Joanna Macy

Guiding Philosophy

My work (teaching, scholarship, and service) is guided by this overarching question: How can we live freer and more conscious lives, while also working to build a more just and humane world?

I feel my task as an academic and more importantly as a human is to live this question, and allow it to work upon my being. The poet and writer Rainier Maria Rilke states this sentiment eloquently: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”