By: Laura Fleetwood on October 23, 2022
Is there a formula for the human experience? Author and professor, Joseph Campbell believed that there was and he described it in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this work, Campbell combined his extensive knowledge of world-wide mythology with modern (at the time) psychology to theorize and describe a monomyth that all…
By: Daron George on October 22, 2022
In his book Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about how there is a monomyth or a hero’s journey motif in all of mythology. The hero’s journey is a cycle “that begins and ends in the hero’s ordinary world but the quest pasts through an unfamiliar special world[1]“. Along this journey, there are some…
By: Audrey Robinson on October 22, 2022
I graduated high school as an agnostic, believing God’s existence could not be proved or disproved. During my last year of high school and throughout my years in undergraduate school, I buried myself in mythology. As an English Literature major in undergraduate school, I enjoyed reading the Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Inferno as…
By: Michael O'Neill on October 22, 2022
Prior to completing Joseph Campbell’s, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I experienced an epiphany. I felt as if I had read this book many times. I knew I had been here before somehow though it was my first time through this book. Why did it feel so familiar? Was this a spiritual reaction? A…
By: Denise Johnson on October 21, 2022
I moved into my place in Sequim nearly a year ago, and with moving comes the seemingly endless unpacking. For me, every box was an adventure of new or a rediscovery of a different life. Some boxes revealed my life before I had a passport, while others were filled with treasures from previous generations. One…
By: Greg McMullen on October 21, 2022
How to Read Numbers brings great insight on how misleading and dangerous numbers and statistics can be and how to spot them.[1] In our society today, we have never had so much information available to us, but never had so much confusion on who or what to believe. In this time of Covid in the…
By: Becca Hald on October 21, 2022
What is a hero? In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes, “The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms.”[1] The hero is one who faces challenges and transforms in the…
By: Chad McSwain on October 21, 2022
It would nearly impossible to unravel the influence of The Hero with a Thousand Faces on modern pop culture. Any fan of Star Wars or Marvel movies is familiar with observations of Joseph Campbell and the way that story shapes our lives. By analyzing mythology through the lens of psychoanalysis [1], Campbell lifts the familiar…
By: Greg McMullen on October 21, 2022
Leading out of Who You Are by Simon Walker provides many different perspectives that depending on past characteristics and learned behavior is most likely how their leadership styles will reflect in their organizations. Often we wear or present a mask to people in public and behind what the public sees, often in wearing these masks, we…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on October 20, 2022
Some heroes slay dragons, some heroes save lives. Still other heroes invest their days in supporting their families, making sure there is food in the fridge, paying the bills on time. There are a thousand ways in which people answer the call to heroine and hero. And yet, according to Joseph Campbell, there is…
By: Henry Gwani on October 20, 2022
Biblical philosophers like the Lord Jesus and Paul occasionally spoke about mysteries. On one occasion, when asked why He spoke a lot in parables, Jesus explained that the ability to understand the mysteries of the kingdom has been given only to His followers. In other words, if He did not illustrate spiritual realities with parables,…
By: Jonathan Lee on October 20, 2022
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher who passed away in 1976. This week’s reading, The Tacit Dimension, is one of the many books he authored. This book was “first published in 1966, and it is based on his Terry Lectures delivered four years earlier, at Yale University”[1] to explain his concepts and insights…
By: Tonette Kellett on October 20, 2022
In Joseph Campbell’s book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, I am reminded that those things that I strive for in the area of fulfillment and satisfaction in life will nearly always lie outside of my comfort zone. Campbell cleverly uses mythology to walk the reader through three life stages common to all “heroes” – and…
By: Roy Gruber on October 20, 2022
The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi contains a clear and concise premise, namely, “we can know more than we can tell.”[1] The book primarily addresses knowledge management, more specifically, tacit knowledge. Polanyi, a Hungarian-British author, and a professor worked in physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. The book is divided into three sections, containing his Terry…
By: Jean de Dieu Ndahiriwe on October 20, 2022
Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces is a fantastic book; this is an excellent story and a journey that relates to everyone regardless of location or background. It is true what Brian says on PNTV; “This is his classic seminal text that’s influenced people like George Lucas, every aspiring film student because every hero’s…
By: Caleb Lu on October 20, 2022
Why does it feel like I go out on what Joseph Campbell calls the “adventure of the hero” every time I try to write my blog for the week? Instead of facing the great wilderness or some mysterious realm that I travel to, I find myself navigating the readings we’re assigned and at times lost…
By: David Beavis on October 20, 2022
The life of Stephen Hawking, as displayed in the movie The Theory of Everything, was largely marked by a search for a single, unifying theory that explains how everything works. When it comes to story-telling across history and societies, Joseph Campbell provides a unifying motif, known as the “hero’s journey.” One can argue that The…
By: Nicole Richardson on October 20, 2022
We were traversing the Nambiti Big 5 Private Reserve in the South African bush on our evening safari by way of Land Cruiser. It was just after sunset when our field guide, Peter, came to a stop. He jumped out of the auto and walked over to a shrub. The 10 of us in the…
By: Troy Rappold on October 20, 2022
In Michael Polanyi’s thin yet dense philosophic work “The Tacit Dimension,” he discusses human knowledge, the scientific method, and how we discover objective truth. Let’s start with the definition of tacit: “understood or implied without being stated.” This is the guiding principle for his book and he goes on to argue that, “we can know…
By: Elmarie Parker on October 20, 2022
Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian-British chemist and informal philosopher, invites the reader to plumb the depths of how knowing and the related issue of the process and structure of thought happens in our minds and bodies. His book, “The Tacit Dimension,” relays his three-part lecture in three chapters (with some modifications) given in 1962 at Yale…
