Benjamin Myers
@BenMyersPoet
Honors Director & Prof. at OBU. Former OK Poet Laureate. Author of The Family Book of Martyrs, Black Sunday, Ambiguity and Belonging.
Know a high school senior who would benefit from the opportunity to take a Great Books core while pursuing the major to which he or she has been called? Know a student looking for small, seminar style classes? We still have room! okbu.edu/academics/hono…
I tend to be soft-hearted when I bump into a particular practitioner of bad poems, but I admire a bit of Flannerian ruthlessness: “Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
Important words! At OBU we still offer a 24-credit-hour Great Books core with additional hours in the trivium and quadrivium. Join us in the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
Highly recommend.
My book on premodern hermeneutics, Taught by God, is nearly 50% off right now on Amazon ($12.95). If you use it this year as a textbook in class or with a group at church, I’ll be happy to Zoom in and chat with your peeps if you’d like! amzn.to/4o6itdG
"We do not merely study the past, we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born"
What do we say when students (or their parents) worry that taking Honors might be "taking on too much"? This.
Always amazing to see how many people go online each day to attempt to convince people of their firm belief that it is wrong to have firm beliefs of which you try to convince people. You just cannot underestimate the level of self-reflection exhibited on the internet daily.
This is, I think, the right way to look at a life's work.
“Jazz is my adventure.” — Thelonious Monk
In each of our three Honors houses (Augustine, Luther, and Lewis), students engage in small, Socratic seminars and stick with the same house seminar group all the way through the 24-credit-hour Honors core. This allows for deep and sustained conversations across semesters.
This is a very moving and well-crafted novel that centers around the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building and which weaves together various narrative threads to explore the concept of aftermath.
Limits and the Good Life | The Russell Kirk Center kirkcenter.org/reviews/limits…
There is so much to think about here, both generally and specific to the Plath story and mythos.
― Sylvia Plath
Listen, I’m happy to scroll silently past as people gush about “poems” that are just cliche-ridden, badly lineated prose which expresses sentiments with which they happen to already agree. But there have to be limits.
Christian McNamara: Is there such a thing as the Front Porch Republic curse? frontporchrepublic.com/2025/07/the-fr…
I'm in Charleston for the CiRCE Institute conference. I've heard some very inspiring talks. I'm thankful there are organizations like CiRCE doing their part to preserve tradition and wisdom.
Wisdom doesn't bend to trends. We still offer a 24-credit-hour core in the Great Books. We still offer Socratic seminars engaging with great minds and the big questions. Join us and explore the great tradition.
On this episode of Anchored, @jennfrey shares the story behind her recently published New York Times op-ed, "Students Want the Liberal Arts. Administrators, Not So Much." Frey reflects on her abrupt dismissal as Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa—despite…
Hear! Hear!
Whenever I bring this up, there are folks who say “kids aren’t interested in the arts,” and I can’t express how much contempt I have for this argument. We don’t stop teaching things just because kids are a bit bored. They only discover a love of those things when we teach them.