“All of my writings address human desires and aspirations with a reverence for facts and principles.”
A Lawyer and A Believer: Part 2
To Be A Lawyer and A Believer: A Two-Part Series Part 2: Believer Originally Published in the Maryland Daily Record Last time I wrote about the impact of religious belief on the professional lives of lawyers, from the perspective of one who professes to...
Abraham and Isaac: Deciding About Sacrifice
Easter 2006 Abraham and Isaac: Deciding About Sacrifice I start with a quote from Bob Dylan that makes light of a horrible dilemma: Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son" Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on" God say, "No." Abe say, "What?" God say,...
Subcreation: From Eden to the New Jerusalem
SUBCREATION: FROM EDEN TO THE NEW JERUSALEM: Genesis Chapters 1 through 3 Easter 2007 The wonderful first three chapters of Genesis -- two of which we have just read -- attempt to grapple with some huge questions: among them where...
Richard II: Shakespeare’s Legal Brief
Richard II: Shakespeare's Legal Brief This paper, produced as a term paper in an independent study course in law school, was published in the Georgetown Law Journal in 1982. To my great pleasure, other scholars still cite it from time to time. Let me again thank my...
The Peter Bell Phenomenon
The Peter Bell Phenomenon In the midst of graduate school at Hopkins, I discovered that I had one set of reasons for being there, and my professors had an altogether different set of reasons for asking me to be there. My dissertation, on the novelist Kingsley Amis,...
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass
Leonard Bernstein's Mass In 2008, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra mounted a grand new production of Leonard Bernstein's Mass, performed in Baltimore, at Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center, among other places. I was commissioned to write four pieces about this...
Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis As recounted in About the Author, I did my doctoral dissertation on Kingsley Amis. When Zachary Leader published his biography of Amis in 2007, Mark Lasswell of the Wall Street Journal tracked me down, and asked me to write a review and to be...
About Jack Gohn
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.