New Faculty Spotlight! Please join us in welcoming 2017 TSRR alumnus Mr. Dominic Bulger to our faculty! Mr. Bulger graduated from Hillsdale College in 2021 with a B.A. in Music. Not surprisingly, his hobbies include playing the cello, music composition, and dabbling in whatever musical instrument he can get his hands on.

Q: Describe a significant life experience.
A: As a senior in high school, I travelled with my family to Rome. I was taking an art history course at the time, and it was amazing to go straight from the classroom to the very paintings and sculptures which I had been studying. It’s one thing to study pictures of Raphael’s *School of Athens* or Bernini’s *David*. It’s quite another to encounter them in person, to get a sense for their size and dimension, to see the ways in which they interact with the spaces they inhabit. Bernini’s craftsmanship in taking a piece of marble which appears to be motionless and dead and transforming it into a boy slinging a sling is masterful, and encountering his work in person was an experience I won’t easily leave behind.

Q: Describe a moment of significant intellectual awakening in your life.
A: As an eighth grader in Literature and Composition, when time came to study poetry in the spring, our teacher took the class outside. He instructed us to take the leaves from the previous fall and crush them up in our hands, rubbing them into our skin. We did so, wiped off our hands, and returned to the classroom. We had a discussion about the memories the smell on our hands evoked–soccer games, jumping in leaf piles, camping, Halloween, and the like. Just as we had reached an agreement that this was a generally positive smell, the teacher threw a wrench in the conversation by saying, “this is the smell of death.” My classmates and I were duly horrified. We then proceeded to read Robert Frost’s “Out, Out–“, a poem which, while I will spare the details, is quite challenging and takes the idea of death very seriously. I was awakened to the mystery we live in every day, which is that death and life are connected in some fundamental way.

Q: What are you most looking forward to about teaching at Trinity this year?
A: I am really looking forward to all I will learn this year! The faculty is filled with wise, intelligent, interesting people, and I am really excited for all the conversations I will have with them. I’m also excited to get in the classroom and start working with students. Teaching is a vocation which I have been thinking and praying about for some time now, so I’m excited to see what it’s all about in real time.