Joe's Got Ideas

ALBANY’S MAGNIFICENT BURDEN A church too grand for human use Photo by Joe Hoffman His tiny claws ticked, echoed against the ornate interior, and suspended him sixty, now seventy feet above the floor. Swishing his bushy tail to balance on the high archway, he could swivel around to gawk at the scene below: the marble speckled with bird droppings, the looming and water-damaged Stations of the Cross staring coldly down from the walls, and the countless pages of sheet music strewn from the nave to the narthex. It’s clear why the New York Times wrote in 1865 at St. Joseph’s dedication that the Albany church was “one of the most magnificent edifices on this Continent.” The 14,350 square feet of interior space still stagger the imagination, and the 31 hand-carved cherubim still fly high above your head with an unearthly serenity. But St. Joe’s past life has faded. About a hundred years after being painstakingly designed and constructed as a place of Mass for the hug...

This was the last draft I submitted to my writing instructor for an Argument Paper assignment this first freshman semester at UAlbany. It has its issues but thought I'd post it here anyways, seeing as this blog has fallen into disuse since school started. We need some freshening up around here! P.S. Sorry for the lack of in-text footnotes, Google Drive couldn't transfer them over. Here's the doc in case you want to check sources easier: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IygbDO8m6oc9CIwJAGj2O95EKrcXJZB9S19Rp5SGeGE/edit?usp=sharing _________________ Educating Optimal Citizens: Can Homeschooling Produce Optimal Citizens? Joseph Hoffman 8 December 2017 Professor Newton UUNI 110 In his seminal work The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato sought to determine what a just society would look like. On his way to creating the perfect society, he spent a maddeningly large portion of the text on how children ought to be educated; he believed that...