Some questions cannot be answered. They can only be inhabited. For sixteen decades, three families have occupied the same stretch of Nebraska prairie, and for sixteen decades they have been asking variations of the same question: what do the living owe the dead? Passage Land is my attempt to inhabit that question long enough to understand why it refuses resolution.
Continue reading → Passage Land: What Do the Living Owe the Dead?
Hey, there! Welp, it’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the indulgence of your continued, kind, support for this blog by buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments. Yes, we live in a money world — even for free reading!
Continue reading → Hey Now! Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025): Buy Now!
Prairie Voice launches today, not because the world needs another website, but because the present has become incomprehensible without the past. We live in an age of unprecedented change, facing questions that feel entirely new: How do we maintain human connection through screens? What does work mean when we produce nothing tangible? How do we raise children when childhood itself has been digitized? These questions aren’t new. They’re variations on themes our ancestors knew intimately. Prairie Voice exists to excavate that buried wisdom and translate it for contemporary crisis.
Continue reading → Announcing Prairie Voice: Where Yesterday’s Wisdom Meets Tomorrow’s Questions
The American Great Plains have produced a literary tradition as vast and complex as the landscape itself. Nebraska, with its braided rivers and endless horizons, stands at the heart of this tradition, having shaped some of the nation’s most distinctive literary voices. From the rolling Sandhills to the fossil-rich badlands, from pioneer settlements to Native American territories, the state’s diverse geography has inspired equally diverse literary responses. This study examines six Nebraska authors who transformed their regional experiences into enduring art: Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, John G. Neihardt, Loren Eiseley, Wright Morris, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. Each brought a unique perspective to bear on the Nebraska experience, from Cather’s lyrical immigrant sagas to Sandoz’s unflinching historical accounts, from Neihardt’s spiritual epics to Eiseley’s paleontological meditations, from Morris’s photographic existentialism to Aldrich’s domestic chronicles.
Continue reading → The Braided Prairie: Six Nebraskan Literary Voices on Land, Life, and Legacy
At first glance, the analytic philosophy of Saul Kripke, the dramatic poetry of Seamus Heaney, and the political statecraft of Queen Elizabeth I could not seem more disparate. What could a 20th-century logician, a Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, and a 16th-century monarch possibly share? Yet, beneath the surface, each grappled with language, identity, and authority in redemptive ways. Each, in their own silo, understood that naming and narrative wield power – whether it’s designating a possible world in logic, naming the unnameable traumas of Irish history, or styling oneself “Virgin Queen” to command a realm. In this exploratory conversation, we’ll sink into Kripke’s revolutionary ideas about reference and necessity, examine Heaney’s dramatic explorations of history and identity, and uncover how Elizabeth I engineered her political identity through language. We’ll reveal subtle connections – the resonances in their treatment of naming, authority, and the notion of necessity – to see how each shaped their world and left a lasting impact on the future. The journey is a thoughtful occupation: part historical detective work, part philosophical reflection, as we uncover lessons and methods from this unlikely trio.
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