Topics

Fra Angelica

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Rembrant's Old Ones

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The Invisible Man

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Uniforms

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Endo's Silence

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The Bluest Eye

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The Heart of the Matter

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The Power & the Glory

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The First & the Last

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Moral Smugness

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

We risk being self-assured of our various virtues and capabilities, and soon we are floating above all others, courtesy of the hot air we have pumped into ourselves.

Gluttony

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Gluttony is something that can arise in the poor as well as the well-to-do: a hunger for something, a possessiveness -- a means by which one loses sight of God.

Lust

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

As Dostoevsky, among others, kept reminding us, when people regard God as dead, anything and everything becomes permissible (protected by this or that amendment).

Anger

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Anger isn't necessarily a sin; think of Jeremiah's anger, Isaiah's, and of course, that of Jesus in the temple and elsewhere in the course of His brief, dangerous, demanding ministry.

Sloth

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Sloth is acceding to the apparent in a religious tradition, the conventional, the readily accessible, and thereby letting the matter (that of one's soul's obligations) rest there.

Covetousness

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

To "succumb" to others, to wish for things because others have them, to want things because others want them, is to lose one's independence, one's own authority.

Envy

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Envy is part of our humanity, something that cannot be altogether banished. But, ironically, envy (like other sins) can help us toward grace.

Pride

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

On Sex Education for the Young

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

On Birth Control

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Talk Shows

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Remembering Erik H. Erikson

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Ralph Ellison's Angle of Vision

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Remembering Christopher Lasch

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

On Divorce

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Gang Members: Their Street Education

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Remembering Walker Percy

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

A Last Conversation with Anna Freud

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

Not Only a Disease

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Moral Anarchy, Moral Necessity

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Life & Death

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Vulnerability

HARVARD DIARY

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

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Memories of 1964

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

What Do Our Children Need?

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Affirming the Reality of the Spiritual

William D. Miller

Harvard Diary won't be a bestseller, but it should be. Coles can write — lyrically at times — and Christ is his measure of what it means to be human.

Raymond Carver's Heart & Soul

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Raymond Carver knew in his bones how inti­mately death lives with us, even when we think of ourselves as (temporarily) beyond its reach.

Raymond Carver's Death

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The obituary of this prominent short-story writer and poet read, "I'm a paid-in-full member of the working poor. I have a great deal of sympathy with them. They're my people."

Raymond Carver's Dying Chekhov

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

A master of short fiction, Carver attends a kind of lit­erary and historical factuality — the great Chek­hov's all too early, untimely encounter with death.

The Legalization of Drugs

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

For our own sons and daugh­ters we want no drug abuse and a sexuality that is kept under constraints. For others "below" us, quite another point of view obtains.

Preachers and Politics

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Father Coughlin was heard by hun­dreds of thousands, and had become, really, a preacher much involved in the politics of his day, the 1930s.

Sinner Swaggart & Our Smugness

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

In our parlors, with our educated tongues, we deplore not only the Swaggarts of this world but all who attend them, and all who aren't quite "up" to us.

A Testing from God

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

As my mother walked, she heard steps behind her, fast moving steps. She glanced back and saw a man moving along behind her, catching up with her...

Children and Media Violence

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Many parents have no control over their own lives, never mind their children's — and yet yearn for certain moral improvements while fearing they'll never take place.

Teaching and Learning, Strutting and Conniving

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

We are in continual jeopardy — of a kind I think best de­scribed by a woman I knew who worked as a food server in a Harvard dorm and in the Faculty Club.

The Secular Mind IV: Relativism

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

My student was a stand-in for millions of us who have been hearing in schools and reading in newspapers that "values vary, depending on the person."

The Secular Mind III: Reductionism

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The Secular Mind II: Positivism

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

The Secular Mind I: Determinism

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Two Tolstoy Stories

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

Tolstoy's Resurrection

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Tolstoy's Confession

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

On Forgiveness

Harvard Diary

Robert Coles

Voluntary Poverty

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The struggle toward voluntary poverty is a privilege and requires constant self-scrutiny, lest smugness and self-righteousness undo a decent and honorable effort.

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.

Idealism

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

How can experts sort solidly idealistic activists from those who would end up a source of trouble to themselves or to those meant to be helped?

Second Coming

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The opening struggle for a New Jerusalem is naturally beyond anyone’s ken. A novelist, perhaps alone among us, has the capacity to make compelling guesses.

On Grace

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

What ev­er our motives, problems, conflicts, our secret and not so secret passions, the real moral test of our worth has to be what we do with ourselves in the course of our everyday lives.

On Sin

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

Today we act as if the only kind of re­morse we really know is unconscious, a re­sponse of the imagination.

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.

On Pornography

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

How are we to protect our children from an entire culture become in so many instances obsessively, coyly, or blatantly pornographic?

On School Prayer

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

When it comes to children praying in school, we hear of the potential jeopardy to…whom?

On Abortion

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

In one way or another, through greed and aggressive manipula­tions and callousness and self-serving rationaliza­tions, we shun our obligations to others.

Edith Stein’s Cross

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

The proud and talented scholar threw herself gladly, ecstatically at His feet, He of the Cross, He whose Cross had become her cross.