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Harvard Diary by Robert Coles
The Underclass, Part V: Children & Violence
December 1989We 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.
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The Underclass, Part IV: Schools & Mentors
October 1989One 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.”
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The Underclass, Part III: Drugs
September 1989How else to think of drug use — by anyone, living anywhere — as but the most obvious evidence of nihilism, of despair?
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The Underclass, Part II: Widespread Teenage Pregnancy
July-August 1989Girls in the ghetto are hungry for love, and desperately afraid of not going along with the social, cultural, and sexual pressures of the street.
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The So-Called Underclass, Part I
June 1989Why don’t the “underclass” want to leave it? Is there, perhaps, some failure not of psychology or school experience but of the moral imagination?
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Affirming the Reality of the Spiritual
December 1988Review of Harvard Diary by Robert Coles
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A Victim of Spiritual Poverty
December 1986I know a successful businessman who is a victim of spiritual poverty, and some materially impoverished people I’ve met are spiritually affluent.
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Physician, Heal Thyself
November 1986An 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.
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In Paul Tillich’s Seminar
October 1986In the heyday of psychoanalytic reductionism, we were entranced with our ability to use psychiatric labels, to explain everything as the result of certain somethings.
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On “Liberation Theology”
September 1986A poor woman once told me that the Church “belongs” to her kind of people, not to them, the rich, the quite comfortable — appearances notwithstanding.
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Thomas Hardy, the Populist
July August 1986When 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.
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William Carlos Williams: A Doctor’s Faith, a Poet’s Faith
June 1986Williams knew how bored, self-centered, and self-indulgent the rich can be, and how desperately confused, vulnerable, and self-lacerating the poor often are.
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Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr
May 1986Niebuhr was the most extraordinary of preachers — a powerfully compelling delivery, all extemporaneous. As a teacher he called upon history and politics with great ease.
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Struggling With Today’s Evils
April 1986Elderly 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.
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Don’t Worry, Dad
March 1986To 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.
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The Spiritual Life of Children — Part III
January-February 1986In my field-work I found people of stoic dignity, often enough making do rather shrewdly, patiently, and thoughtfully against great odds.
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The Gift of Thomas Merton
April 1985Merton 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.
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The Hero Without & Within
March 1985The usual categories we summon to describe people, to explain their motives and purposes, can be rendered utterly inadequate by particular moments of crisis.
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Small Gestures
January-February 1985Being clever, brilliant, even what gets called “well-educated” is not to be equated, necessarily, with being considerate, kind, tactful, even plain polite or civil.
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- Karl Keating
