Marilyn McEntyre is a steward of words. She has taught courses on English and medical humanities, and she has written or edited over twenty books, including Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. Marilyn joins Elise to discuss the meaning of four words: dwelling, compassion, truth, and awe. Marilyn discusses why she loves participles and how “Christianese” can constrict the meaning of a word. She also reads three of her own poems and explains the background and inspiration of each.

• Words as building materials

• How space shapes us

• Medicine being deeply embedded in culture

• Particularity and universality

• A productive relationship between loneliness and dwelling

• Touch deprivation

• The strength and resilience of compassion

• Christianese

• Our relationship to Industrial food system

• A broader examination of conscience

• Truth as embodied and relational

• The act of translation

• Convicted civility

• Why do we lie?

• Relationship between death and awe

• Accompanying the dying

Links:

Dwelling in the Text by Marilyn McEntyre
Word Tastings: An Essay Anthology by Marilyn McEntyre
Teaching Literature and Medicine by Marilyn McEntyre
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn McEntyre
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben
Should Trees Have Standing?: Law, Morality, and the Environment by Christopher D. Stone
I MARRY YOU: A Sheaf of Love Poems by John Ciardi
Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict by Marilyn McEntyre
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky