Articles - January 2025

Community matters

On the sermons of Tyrone Williams

A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022. 

Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.

The date, Diogenes, and the dog

On Susan Schultz

Diogenes sitting in his tub by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860).
Diogenes sitting in his tub by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860).

Schultz writes so that the general unhingement is revealed in personal perceptions, emotions, and relations; and personal unhingement points back toward the general. If we live in a world of madness and deceit, how can we remain sane and honest? 

I emailed Susan Schultz about madness (May 28, 2024): “I really believe there is some general madness becoming more and more prevalent and pervasive in everything — from state policy to personal emotion. There seems no sense of rational-ethical bearing; a general unhingement.