Looking Back on 2020

Jan 1

Written By Jeffrey Longhofer & Jerry Floersch

We posted our first blog on August 31, 2020 and have since posted nearly 50. Some have come from contributors and many have come from our early morning breakfast conversations. Some have come from colleagues and friends we’ve known for more than 40 years: artists, musicians, poets. Others follow our long reflections on past writing and reading. As we end 2020 and begin to look to the New Year we will continue to blog each week, at least once weekly and sometimes more. We hope that our regular contributors will continue to make contributions and that others will join in the conversation. We thought it might be interesting and useful for some readers to know where we’ve often turned to help us deepen our understanding of 2020 and the pandemic so we offer below connections to those we’ve connected with; these are the people who’ve most influenced us in 2020. You will find links to the essays that we’ve read and often used in our commentary. While we don’t always agree with the ideas expressed by these thinkers we have nonetheless benefitted from their thinking.

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov a character – the Grand Inquisitor – suggests that people can’t cope with the human condition in all its complexity, and are happier when told what to do and how to live. Our wish for 2021 and beyond is that we begin to see the world more complexly and that we help others on this journey and that we manage to listen to others with the same in mind.