Christopher Hurtado's Commonplace Blog

Commonplaces from Jesus Wants to Save Christians by Rob Bell

Posted on August 30th, 2022

Assuming a prophet is simply someone who speaks for God, you could say that the queen of Sheba gets the whole prophet...

Commonplaces from Method Infinite

Posted on August 10th, 2022

Elder Rudger Clawson, then the junior member of the quorum, recorded his impressions in his personal diary: 11 . . . ...

Commonplaces from The Art of Biblical Poetry by Robert Alter

Posted on July 28th, 2022

1 - The Dynamics of Paralellism The actual sound of biblical poetry will remain at least to some extent a matter of ...

Commonplaces from The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

Posted on July 23rd, 2022

For it is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and t...

Commonplaces from Night by Elie Wiesel

Posted on July 19th, 2022

EVENINGS, AS WE LAY on our cots, we sometimes tried to sing a few Hasidic melodies. Akiba Drumer would break our hear...

Commonplaces from The Book of Job by Raymond P. Scheindl

Posted on July 16th, 2022

The reason we read an ancient, exotic book is not to confirm our own literary habits and imaginations but to expand t...

Commonplaces from The Book of Job by Thomas Moore

Posted on July 16th, 2022

At one time in my younger years, I was feeling unusually confused about how to deal with mortality. The issue came to...

Commonplaces from Personal History by Katharine Graham

Posted on July 9th, 2022

I was allowed out of bed only four hours each day. Lally used to come into my room after school every afternoon in he...

Commonplaces from Alcestis by Euripides and Ted Hughes

Posted on May 10th, 2022

Man is deluded and his ludicrous gods Are his delusion. Death is death is death. 10 You hear men and women swear T...

Commonplaces from Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera

Posted on May 9th, 2022

"When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality o...
Christopher Hurtado

Christopher Hurtado has over twenty-five years' experience teaching a broad range of subjects. He is self-taught in the classics, holds a Bachelor's in Middle East Studies/Arabic and Philosophy from Brigham Young University, and an MA in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He is a serial entrepreneur with startup and takeover/turnaround experience in various industries. He has varying degrees of fluency in twelve languages and has lived and traveled abroad extensively. He lives in Mapleton, Utah with his wife, Alysia, and their children.