Topics

Fra Angelica

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Rembrant's Old Ones

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Robert Coles

The Invisible Man

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Robert Coles

Uniforms

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Robert Coles

Endo's Silence

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Robert Coles

The Bluest Eye

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Robert Coles

The Heart of the Matter

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Robert Coles

The Power & the Glory

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Robert Coles

The First & the Last

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Robert Coles

Moral Smugness

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Robert Coles

Gluttony

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Robert Coles

Lust

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Robert Coles

Anger

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Robert Coles

Sloth

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Robert Coles

Covetousness

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Robert Coles

Envy

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Robert Coles

Pride

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Robert Coles

On Sex Education for the Young

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Robert Coles

On Birth Control

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Robert Coles

Talk Shows

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Robert Coles

Remembering Erik H. Erikson

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Robert Coles

Ralph Ellison's Angle of Vision

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Robert Coles

Remembering Christopher Lasch

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Robert Coles

On Divorce

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Robert Coles

Gang Members: Their Street Education

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Remembering Walker Percy

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Robert Coles

A Last Conversation with Anna Freud

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

Not Only a Disease

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Robert Coles

Moral Anarchy, Moral Necessity

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Robert Coles

Life & Death

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Robert Coles

Vulnerability

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Robert Coles

The Underclass, Part VI: What Is to Be Done?

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The Underclass, Part V: Children & Violence

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

We see kids on the street with guns and stacks of $100 bills. There’s no rule of law, no belief in anyone’s laws -- not man’s, not God’s.

The Underclass, Part IV: Schools & Mentors

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

One youth says, “I look at those teachers and their books, and I say: man, you’re out in space, and I’m where I am, and there’s nothing between us.”

The Underclass, Part III: Drugs

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

How else to think of drug use — by anyone, living anywhere — as but the most obvious evidence of nihilism, of despair?

The Underclass, Part II: Widespread Teenage Pregnancy

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Girls in the ghetto are hungry for love, and desperately afraid of not going along with the social, cultural, and sexual pressures of the street.

The So-Called Underclass, Part I

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Why don’t the “underclass” want to leave it? Is there, perhaps, some failure not of psychology or school experience but of the moral imagination?

The Day After Inauguration

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Teaching Fourth Grade

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Robert Coles

Memories of 1964

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Robert Coles

What Do Our Children Need?

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Robert Coles

Raymond Carver's Heart & Soul

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Robert Coles

Affirming the Reality of the Spiritual

William D. Miller

Review of Harvard Diary by Robert Coles

Raymond Carver's Death

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Raymond Carver's Dying Chekhov

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Robert Coles

The Legalization of Drugs

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Preachers and Politics

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Robert Coles

Sinner Swaggart & Our Smugness

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Robert Coles

A Testing from God

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Robert Coles

Children and Media Violence

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Robert Coles

Teaching and Learning, Strutting and Conniving

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Robert Coles

The Secular Mind IV: Relativism

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Robert Coles

The Secular Mind III: Reductionism

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Robert Coles

The Secular Mind II: Positivism

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

The Secular Mind I: Determinism

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Robert Coles

Two Tolstoy Stories

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

Tolstoy's Resurrection

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Robert Coles

Tolstoy's Confession

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Robert Coles

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

On Forgiveness

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

Voluntary Poverty

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

A Victim of Spiritual Poverty

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

I know a successful businessman who is a victim of spiritual poverty, and some materially impoverished people I’ve met are spiritually affluent.

Physician, Heal Thyself

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

An enormous irony shadows us throughout life: our capacity, our willingness even, to talk one line and live another — like the policeman caught stealing, the lawyer who breaks the law.

In Paul Tillich’s Seminar

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

In the heyday of psychoanalytic reductionism, we were entranced with our ability to use psychiatric labels, to explain everything as the result of certain somethings.

On “Liberation Theology”

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

A poor woman once told me that the Church “belongs” to her kind of people, not to them, the rich, the quite comfortable — appearances notwithstanding.

Thomas Hardy, the Populist

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

When Thomas Hardy’s "Jude the Obscure" was published, Victorian England was hardly ready to accept that novel’s story of a love affair between cousins.

William Carlos Williams: A Doctor’s Faith, a Poet’s Faith

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Williams knew how bored, self-centered, and self-indulgent the rich can be, and how desperately confused, vulnerable, and self-lacerating the poor often are.

Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Niebuhr was the most extraordinary of preachers — a powerfully compelling delivery, all extemporaneous. As a teacher he called upon history and politics with great ease.

Struggling With Today’s Evils

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Elderly folks I once knew were proud of their indifference to the urban American world and its culture, its values and habits, of which they occasionally heard from their children.

Don’t Worry, Dad

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

To be a father is to love the children enough to give them boosts, examples, and assistance but also to stumble with them, before them, on their account.

The Spiritual Life of Children — Part III

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

In my field-work I found people of stoic dignity, often enough making do rather shrewdly, patiently, and thoughtfully against great odds.

The Spiritual Life of Children — Part II

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The spiritual life of children is well worth comprehending on its own merits, with its own dignity and significance, rather than as an expression of something else.

The Spiritual Life of Children — Part I

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The mother of a child I was studying said, 'You ask our daughter about everything except God.' I was at a loss for words.

Why Follow Freud?

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Today it is the biological side of psy­chiatry that entrances, and so the old emphasis on talking and listening seems old-fashioned and unpromis­ing.

Freud, the Secular Moralist

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The man who told us that religion is an “illusion” ended up, ironically, sup­plying a faith of sorts to many thousands.

Walker Percy’s Christian Existentialism

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

In every Percy novel there is a complex, reli­giously sensitive yet also modern and scientific sen­sibility at work.

Further Thoughts on Abortion

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

A poor woman I knew regarded herself, when pregnant, as the recipient of a gift from God. For me, the matter was at once abstract and circumstantial.

Silone’s Religious Humanism

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The world is wolfish, devouring, full of evil, Silone knew — yet, good will and love are also constantly in evidence: God’s gift to us.

The Gift of Thomas Merton

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Merton was a constantly changing person, and years in the monastery did nothing to stop that process, for all the enclosing, demanding steadiness of the monastic routine.

The Hero Without & Within

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The usual categories we summon to describe people, to explain their motives and purposes, can be rendered utterly inadequate by particular moments of crisis.

Small Gestures

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Being clever, brilliant, even what gets called “well-educated” is not to be equated, necessarily, with being considerate, kind, tactful, even plain polite or civil.

Teenage Pregnancy: A Moral Matter

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Young women also are spiritually hungry for a sense of purpose and meaning in life, for something or someone to believe in, for moral direction.

Psychology as Faith

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

I am tired of watching ministers or priests mouth psychiatric pieties, when “hard praying” is what the particular human being may want, and yes, urgently require.

Impressions of Nicaragua — Part II

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

In the well-to-do sections of Managua, the Pope’s picture may be seen displayed proudly on the doors of houses, in any number of windows.

Impressions of Nicaragua — Part I

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Recently I went with two of my sons to Nica­ragua, where we spent time visiting schools, hospitals, clinics, a number of Managua’s barrio homes, and those of other cities.

On Homosexuality

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

We owe each other tact, discretion, the right of individuality — and a consideration of what kind of public values, what kind of larger so­cial and cultural scene, we want.

On Women’s Liberation

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The significance of the biological distinctions between men and women, amplified by centuries of religiously and culturally encouraged differences, are not to be altogether scorned.