On teachers

Just hanging out on the blogs today, I have had occasion to quote not only my professor of classical Hebrew (in discussion of the ramifications of the first word of Genesis for Biblical literalism versus science), but also my Navajo-language professor (for an analogy between Navajo views on different kinds of death and their parallels to apoptosis and necrosis). Both of these men were first-class scholars, and they bridged a huge conceptual divide, between English-speaking students and languages that share very little vocabulary and structure in common with English.

As I wrote elsewhere, it has been my privilege in this life to have many wonderful teachers, of whom these two are a representative sample. I am grateful to each of them in very different ways, for the windows onto the world that they opened for me.