Intervals of Hesitation: Essays on the Ethical Life 2013-2017

by Richard Kyte

Intervals of Hesitation collects four years of Richard Kyte’s continuing series of columns on the ethical life written for the La Crosse Tribune. These essays range across diverse contemporary and perennial topics, from friendship to football, ecology to racism, leadership to bluegrass. Throughout, Kyte writes with insight, candor, clarity, and wit. His overriding purpose is not to take sides or argue for a point-of-view but to invite us to think through ethical problems. By doing so he demonstrates that moral reasoning inspires both personal integrity and civic virtue. Kyte’s essays invite us to step back from conflict and confusion, to pause in reflection, and experience what Simone Weil has called an “interval of hesitation,” in which we can recognize ourselves and our shared community with others.