Today we remember a profound thinker who continues to remind us of the danger of instrumentalized art in the service of merely ideological ends—and the role of hospitality, personal influence, in the upholding of truth.

"On this particular day ... we had just said to one another that if our nature was so unhappy as to possess only a pseudo-intelligence capable of everything but the truth, if, sitting in judgment on itself, it had to debase itself to such a point, then we could neither think nor act with any dignity. In that case everything became absurd—and impossible to accept."

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It's been 40 years since one of the greatest upsets in NCAA tournament basketball history, when North Carolina State University beat the highly favored University of Houston and future Hall-of-Famers Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon in the title game. It's been 30 years since the coach of that championship team, Jim Valvano, delivered his famous ESPY Awards speech. Valvano died of cancer the following month.

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Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, I was surrounded by multi-generational Irish families whose capacity for storytelling and singing left a deep impression on me. When, in the last few years, my parents died a year apart, the celebrations of their lives were marked by the presence of lots of Irish friends. In fact, their heartfelt Irish mourning was a model for others. After the funeral for my father, I received texts from friends asking me for copies of some of the toasts that were given. People were hungry for language that, at a moment of great loss, would help them to remember and mourn, to laugh and cry. The Irish, like many other immigrant communities, know how to respond to death — something we seem to be losing in our wider culture.

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The seventeenth-century mathematician, philosopher, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal once remarked, "The truth is so obscured these days that only those who love it will find it."

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I spent the early part of the summer teaching an online symbolic logic class at Baylor. One of the refreshing things about teaching logic is how tidy so much of it is. There are rules for testing arguments; it's easy to tell when an answer is wrong and equally easy to say why it's wrong. To take a simple example: a thing cannot simultaneously be "A" and "not A," at least not at the same time and in the same way. Those are mutually exclusive. In higher level logic classes, much debated foundational questions arise, but not so much in an introductory class.

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