Jeff Rufo, Ph.D.

There have been disagreements between the Catholic Church and scientists since the age of Galileo. He had the courage to argue, correctly, that the Earth rotates and orbits the Sun, contrary to...

After the narrator gives a lecture at a women’s rights conference, a woman invites him home to discuss the Brotherhood. She turns out to have a husband who neglects her, choosing to sleep in a...

Two characters who indicate that people are willing to bend their morals in the face of authority are Cassius and Mark Antony. In act 1, scene 2 of the play, the senator Cassius says that while he...

In Persepolis, the government institutes a law requiring women to cover their heads and faces with veils. Young Marjane is dismayed by events in her city, finding life under Islamic rule unpleasant...

Throughout his journey to the underworld, Dante encounters people banished forever to hell for their injustice, or political crimes, such as fraud, murder, and betrayal of family. Some of the most...

In the history of Western political philosophy, there are few thinkers as influential as Lucretius and Seneca. Whereas little is known about the former, the purported author of On the Nature of...

The Yellow Wallpaper by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a novella (or short story) written in first-person narration. It’s a story about a young...

In Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, identity is a matter of contestation. Who decides what a person should be called? Surely not the notorious N-word, a slander used in the novel by bigots. For...

The study of rhetoric is as old as literature itself. Rhetoric is concerned with the arts of persuasion and representation, known to classicists as mimesis. Artful writers select specific words,...

The Bible is a book that has brought people of all backgrounds and belief systems great comfort and faith when facing adversity. Regardless of whether one believes in the literal truth of the...

Trifles, first performed in 1916, is a one-act play by the American author Susan Glaspell. The play is frequently anthologized in literature textbooks for its dramatic tension and stark depictions...

The protagonist and central detective of the murder-mystery novel The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts by Lilian Jackson Braun is a man by the name of Jim Qwilleran. When he is called to investigate...

Alain Robbe-Grillet, a twentieth-century French author and filmmaker, is the chief inventor of the 1950s and 1960s literary style or genre known as the New Novel” (Nouveau Roman). The purpose of...

Marianne Moore was a twentieth-century poet who wrote in the shadow of Emily Dickinson, one of the most innovative artists in the field of American literature. Like Dickinson, Moore uses...

When it comes to morality, there have been many virtues thought to be advantageous in a servant of the law. Due to the high value placed on right conduct in matters of criminal justice, men and...