Alumni Commons


Each of the four 2026 Oxford debates is now available on YouTube!
2026 Topics
March 26: Previously unclaimed and uninhabited territories should be open to colonization by individual, existing nations.
Result- Pro: 25, Con: 38
March 31: Schools have a responsibility to teach children about gun safety. Result- Pro: 32, Con: 18
April 7: It is immoral to patent life-saving medicines.
Result- Pro: 40, Con: 15
April 9: The United Nations should expand refugee status to include environmental refugees. Result- Pro: 23, Con: 35


Disoriented:
Embodied Life in Strange Times
Agnes Howard, Ph.D.
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities
Christ College – Valparaiso University
This book validates the reasonable sense readers might have that daily life has gotten strange. Howard focuses not on conspicuous crises that fill news cycles, like wars or elections, but the texture of everyday life where it may be hard to pinpoint what seems off. This book helps readers name ways that manners have become weird—keto diets alongside food porn, influencer as dream job, rehearsal dinners that come after weddings—and follows this disquiet into areas where people do some of their most important living. Chapters consider what we eat and what schools teach children, how we work, find love, raise families, and live faithfully. Pairing observation and explanation, Howard sets changes in historical context, American and her own, to help liberate readers from the tyranny of the present. Understanding how things got to be the way they are offers an antidote to current disquiet and preserves wonder at the good of embodied life.
Cascade (2026)

The Poetry of Bob Dylan
Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs
Mike Chasar ’93, Ph.D.
Professor of English and English Department Chair
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon
An innovative resource for Bob Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Examining how Dylan’s lyrics shape or get shaped by vocalization, performance, instrumentation, film, recording technologies, and the forces of history unfolding around him, this collection models a range of ways to understand the songs as poetical phenomena by answering questions like: How can we read and understand Dylan’s lyrics as poetry? How do those lyrics build on, dialogue with, and expand the poetic tradition? How does Dylan’s style change over time while both pushing and responding to changes in the world of popular music? Keep reading…
Bloomsbury Press (2025)
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