—The following is a tribute to my father, Kevin Barnhurst,

I decided to make a tribute to him.

Dad and I were working on this essay (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1464884916689150) when he died.

Dad was a flawed human being, but one comfort is that I almost exclusively remember good things about him, and feel pleasure in remembering him. I know thats good for both of us. We were at odds a lot when I was a kid. I went through a different kind of school system engineered to dumb down the American population, and entered college a logical positivist by default, but underneath all that wash, I was deeply skeptical of my “education”. For dad his family didn’t trust his decision to enter college, and the situation was reversed. For him school was how to become educated, for me what education I have was a result of conversation (with him and many others). I probably would not have gone to college at all if dad hadn’t pushed me hard to apply. That was one of the strange things about dad, he was very forceful, and only made me more stubborn, but he softened later in life and knew how to make his force felt in a strangely soft way.

We kept a long tradition of holding protracted conversations in the evenings and into the night. I owe my intellectual development primarily to him, and it is strange how long it took me, all the way to the last few years of his life, to realize what a gift that was and to reach an understanding that allows respect his for work.