Welcome
You have navigated to the personal website of H. L. (Bud) Goodall, Jr. I am a professor of communication who is all about narratives and their central role in scholarship, politics, cultures, and counter-terrorism.
I live and work as a narrative ethnographer, which is to say that I am never not working, never not writing, and never not learning more about narrative ways of knowing. For me, narratives offer answers to four questions:
- How do we make sense of everyday life?
- How do we connect new information to existing knowledge?
- How do we justify the resulting actions we take?
- Who do I want to be in the future and how might I best accomplish that life?
My blog, “The Daily Narrative,” is here for your reading and commenting pleasure … add your own narrative or counter mine.
In addition to the blog, please check out my recent publications, public appearances, and forthcoming books and articles. Let me and the others who read it know what you think, what you like, what you don’t like, and, please, share with us your stories …
- H.L. (Bud) Goodall, Jr.
Latest Blog Posts
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The Glorious Ordinary
What are days for?Days are where we live.They come, they wake usTime and time over.They are to be happy in:Where can we live but days?
--From “Days,” by Philip Larkin
This morning I arose early and made rich dark Sumatran coffee just as a splendid pink-and-blue-sky dawn broke over the Superstition Mountains east of here. It was pure sky poetry. I gave thanks to God for this gift of another day of cancer-free life and… Read more... -
Moving Beyond the Limit of Our Sight: Goodbye, Rebekah Smith Whitehouse
Life is eternal, and love is immortal,and death is only a horizon;and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.~Rossiter Worthington Raymond
Sandra and I lost a friend to colon cancer this week: Rebekah Smith Whitehouse. We met her last summer when we arrived for the first time at the Room of Orange Chairs.
She was perched in one of the chairs waiting for her chemo treatment to begin. “Hi!” she said with… Read more... -
Stop "Shoulding": The Only New Year's Resolution You'll Ever Need
I’ve been quiet on the blogging front for the first week of this splendid New Year, mostly because I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about now that my cancer is in remission.
In the olden days I used this blog to write about politics, communication, and culture, and while that thematic triad will never totally disappear from my writing, most of you have let me know that since my diagnosis back in… Read more...
Featured Books
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Counter-Narrative 
“A rhetorical tour de force that offers academics and the public alike a persuasive counterstatement against far right political views... to reclaim the original intention of U.S. democracy—‘to promote the common good.’”
- Lawrence R. Frey, Calgaard Professor of Communication and Social Justice, Trinity University
