by Peter Scotchmer | Mar 24, 2026 | Essays
Peter Scotchmer writes about the enduring lure of utopia and why humanity’s attempts to build perfect societies so often end in dystopia. I will not walk with your progressive apes, Erect and sapient. Before them gapes The dark abyss to which their progress...
by Peter Scotchmer | Dec 2, 2025 | Essays
In this piece, Peter talks about the enduring power of inherited wisdom and how neglecting it leaves us unmoored. In a speech delivered in 1858, Abraham Lincoln foresaw the consequences of the ruinous Civil War that was to devastate his nation: “A house divided...
by Peter Scotchmer | Nov 25, 2025 | Essays
In this piece, Peter talks about how Hagar’s pride blinds her to the shared moral wisdom all humans depend on. In Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, the combative central character Hagar Shipley (nee Currie) tells the story of her own life. The reader must be...
by Peter Scotchmer | Oct 21, 2025 | Stories
Peter Scotchmer writes a short story on how love sees truth even when the eyes refuse to. Near the beginning of the semester, Rebecca Cooper, slim, blonde and beautiful, stood somewhat shamefacedly before her teacher’s desk after class, self-consciously twisting an...
by Peter Scotchmer | Sep 16, 2025 | Essays
Irony and the human condition: Peter Scotchmer on why double vision matters more than ever. “…the ironist is caught in a boundary zone between two opposed and mutually exclusive perspectives… between the necessity to believe in the world as it ought to be, and the...