The Romantic Modernists’ convictions regarding the divine essence of humankind were the basis for their antipathy toward social conventions and institutions.
The ways in which the concept of “religion” operates in that culture as motive and as effect, how it mutates, what it affords and obstructs, what memories it shelters or excludes, are not eternally fixed.
Western conceptions of political secularism do not appear to have travelled well to other societies.
The root notion of the secular is a contrast not to religion but to eternity.
Rare are intellectuals who both achieve a leading status in their field and relentlessly pursue knowledge that seeks to better the lives of ordinary people. Amartya Sen is one.
To what degree have we turned away from the public sphere and the obligations it lays upon us? Has this happened across all realms of life, or more in some realms and less in others?
When people’s personal friendship networks become more religiously diverse, that seems to make them more accepting of other faiths, but it also turns out that if you add friends within a congregation, more church friends, you actually become more civically engaged.
The ideology of the pure gift is not foreign or extraneous to the monetization of relationships.
The successful formation and launching of children still matters; it is just that parents don’t want to launch them very far.
Given that most Americans now assume that children are priceless and fragile, it is no surprise that many have striven to remove all risks they might face.
Among their many meanings, zombies have come to symbolize the force of globalization.
The hope of reform and renewal, the conviction that things could get better, was crucial to the founding of this nation.
To the arguments of Huxley and Tyndall against traditional religion, Yeats had no answer until literature and the other arts came to the rescue.
There is a long series of instances in which public health agencies have responded to disease outbreaks with dangerous Pollyannaism, seemingly violating their core mission.
Disruption culture has filtered out of the boardrooms of the economic elite into management texts, self-help literature, and career development advice meant for the average worker.
What kind of society can be produced from a work culture that demands so much from its workers without offering them stability in return?
Majoring in English, the sales pitch now goes, will help you craft your soul.
For some friends of the library, no defense of the stacks is necessary.
A human person is a historical being, in whom the past remains immanent in the present, and whom the wear and tear of time enhances rather than diminishes.
I am concerned with the quality of our choices as choices, and I am interested in excavating from our behaviors and artifacts an archaeology of our emotional life in the hope that naming these feelings can help us begin to reclaim our choices as our own.
Reconsidering the complex relationship between humans and the wider animal kingdom.
The interplay of friendship and technology has been far longer-running than we think.
Food is a strong proof of our animality; it is equally strong evidence of how we transcend it.
A grotesque and caricatured version of Simone Weil undermines an otherwise good book.
Like a lover of endangered species, the lover of endangered words jumps for joy when he sees a word being rescued.
Statistics in the Progressive Era were more than mere signs of a managerial government’s early efforts to sort and categorize its citizens.
In the event you needed any further bad news in this year of the coronavirus pandemic, you’ll find it in this piercing, distressing, and shaming account of our tendency to follow the herd.
We need more profanity? Aren’t we already being inundated with it?
Like the “radical orthodoxy” associated with John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, and an array of other British and American theologians, Hart’s project of rejuvenation has been no narrowly theological or academic exercise.
When you turn to the news, what you will encounter, overwhelmingly, is crime.
We might be murderers, and we might not, but isn’t it safer to assume we are and be proven wrong? Maybe not.
What do we mean by culture? Don’t ask me, I’m a political scientist.
Straight women are not unusually boring. We are, however, coded.
“White Christian nationalism” remains a grievance-driven mode of whiteness.
Privilege today still comes with strings attached, but they are different now.
In any case, trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration.
The less politics effects change, the more politics will affect mood.
Awareness is not the opposite of ignorance. Rather, it’s a stand-in for performative gestures of all kinds.
Is love so discrete and impregnable that it can subsist in the midst of the most repellent undertakings?
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
How is an alignment of the authentic self and the college admissions process possible?
We used to want to assimilate into the mainstream. Now identity is front and center of what we want the world to know about us.
The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness.
We see the peculiar features of neoauthoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations of the ancient tradition of divine kingship.
Ehrenerklärung—public acknowledgment of false accusations—is not one of the options offered by our social media culture.
Does the loss of confidence in the humanities suggest a problem about knowledge or a problem about value?
Why precisely are the most fortunate of us the most restless? How can our private, individual restlessness explain our public, political sclerosis?
Perhaps we can tuck our disagreements about fundamental things away into our private lives, and let the public sphere be a place for adjudicating public things.
Viewing the Anthropocene as “a measure of human impact on the planet” allows us to tell only one story.
Is a feminist movement that speaks straight at me, let alone one whose central goal is to liberate me further, really a good use of anybody’s time?
The challenge of institutional ethics training is not just teaching rules, regulations, and norms—but teaching employees to care.
Bellah held the conviction that religious matters were not purely intellectual, much less merely academic.
The only way out of this prison of self-deception and self-justification is to love and seek the truth.
The cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance.
I’ve been cursed to envision peace without ever experiencing it myself.
Defenders of abortion might more wisely reframe their case around the central importance of care.
More disorder, more screening, more care: the familiar talking points, all dutifully repeated.
The practice of exercising judgment requires that very common sense upon which a common world is based.
There is the looming sense that critical theory is somehow near the center of the crisis of our time.
The fact is that we do not hold desire and reason together very well.
What is the relationship between our conception of ultimate purpose and digital technology?
We are witnessing the ultimate emergence of tensions latent in the very foundations of the modern.
Where do the Hasidim fit in the American picture of religious liberty?
More and more, our lives happen there, on the screens of the bleeping little tyrants in our pockets.
Surely among the proper responses to despair is something more like disdain, contempt, loathing, a refusal to stoop—in short, a refusal to surrender?
Because you don’t need friends, and they don’t need you, you must seek them out.
Work is hard in large part because it is a site where people place serious demands on each other. Meeting those demands can be painful.
True adulthood in a true liberalism depends on properly using God’s gift of liberty of the will.
Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.
The rise of unbelief is correlated to the lived experience of urban and industrial settings.
The young will be formed. The question is how.
The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.
The Claphamites unquestionably launched a revolution in manners that shaped what we have come to know as Victorian morality.
Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb is a casualty of both the Cold War and its aftermath.
Considering how relationships of cooperation and perhaps even solidarity might be forged between human beings and animals.
We would do well to heed Kafka’s insight that Flaubert found in family life a kind of flourishing he himself failed to seek.
Rick Steves teaches travel as a kind of road to civic transformation.
Democracy has its place, Becca Rothfeld argues, but nowhere near the wilds of erotic love or art.
It is remarkable how little the usage of vibes has changed from the era of the counterculture to the present day.
One is encouraged to curate—if not outright fabricate—details from one’s personal life to present to the market.
Our contemporary culture is a culture of nihilism without nihilists.
The costs of a consumerist culture in which obsolescence is a strategy continue to mount.
Measurable impact has crept into everyday understandings of charity.
The case for reading Anthony Trollope begins by recognizing that he should be read because he is not of our time.
An unsettling study of “connective labor” and its increasing subjection to bureaucratic and technological control.
Cutting anti-natalists down is one thing, but building up the left’s case for children is more difficult.
Family policy is at the heart of an intense debate about the future of any plausible post-neoliberal governance.
Superbloom appraises the past and present of information technology and issues a warning about its future.
The development of AI reads less like a familiar chapter from the history of consumer capitalism and more like the storyboard of a Bond film in which we’ve all been cast as extras.
Closure offers itself to us in the shape of a demi-nirvana, a liberation from suffering, whose achievement means that one has closed the door on the past, cabined it for good, put paid to it, consigned it to oblivion’s undotted line.
Thinking about homeless requires separating it from the larger discourse on poverty.
One of the most salient features of the post–World War II suburb was its localization of the American middle class and its propagation of practices of mass consumption.
The renovated Place de la République shows the power of the public square.
According to Sherry Turkle's latest book, my peers and I simply can’t stand sitting alone with our thoughts, and it’s hurting our capacity for intimacy.
There is a risk that we will compensate for the current sense of crisis and isolation with too much closeness.
The return to normalcy will be long, and we might even change our mind along the way.
A human spirit of community and kindness can be learned. But it can also be forgotten.
The gap between our concepts of love and justice has served us poorly.
We need to preserve a distinction between recognizing our transgressions and resolving to change, on one hand, and imagining that we can forgive ourselves, on the other.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
Reading and interpreting poetry offers a unique way to cultivate ethical knowledge and therefore bears on collective, and not just individual, life.
What if the more successful political commentators on Substack, or music teachers on YouTube, or masters of the podcast interview, began to teach their craft to others?
Renewing your weaks social ties might make your closest ties stronger.
The pulsating song of billions of seventeen-year cicadas.
It’s easy to see how lectures got a bad rap. We have all been subjected to someone who abused the privilege of an audience.
Pretending that all workers are the same obscures rather than clarifies the reality of class.
That means, first, that I have to love my neighbor—my colleague—above my own productivity.
We view the concept of “compromise” from all sorts of oblique angles.
Perhaps computers are so bad at conversation because it is something like prayer.
Once you see that even those you disagree with most strongly normally have something important to say, debates become dialogues.
Big data can’t save us from mental distresses and disorders.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse is personally important, a way to achieve an absolute good through connecting people.
Are we willing to undertake the long, slow work of persuasion in a time of the politics of personal destruction?
Jean-Luc Godard, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is worth paying attention to even when we think his work is bad
What if Ann Rutledge had lived, and she and Lincoln had married?
No one works in Rajneeshpuram. They “worship.” Worship includes grading roads, plowing fields, pursuing the many lawsuits brought by Bhagwan in Oregon.
Austen’s sparing use of attributions is also a sign of her confidence in her art. She dispensed with unnecessary scaffolding.
The philosophical divide doesn’t neatly correspond with our political divide. There are egoists on all sides, just as there are altruists.
John von Neumann’s life ended the way many of those of his intellectual caliber end: in madness.
Memories are important because—and when—they are selective, and few.
A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.
Dick Allen faced racist taunts and boos so numerous and unrelenting that he became the first player in baseball to wear his batting helmet out in the field.
I don’t like this collapse of trust; I don’t like being in a technological arms race with my students.
Scheherazade’s story is about stories themselves.
Debating the stakes of the “New Puritanism”
This fall marks Tommy Tate’s twentieth year as a crossing guard for the city of Washington, DC.
If I have to stand on my own two feet, epistemically, how can I be sure that my knowledge really is knowledge?
One big and enduring reason Jerry trusted me is that he sensed that I was no stranger to the dark spot in the wood—something we shared in common.
The strength of ideologies and fads in the US helps to explain why physician involvement in public life has declined.
“Getting management to take your side” is the almost inevitable strategy, the natural default, for people who disdain the work of persuasion.
SNL’s contemporary standing as an established institution has somewhat obscures its initial trailblazing daring.
Compartmentalization is better than the production of work that is half-hearted.
Those of us who remain tethered to reality do not require our lovers to pretend to be a succession of role-playing fantasy lovers.
Perhaps our interconnectedness would be more self-evident if only each of us were more vigilant and watchful for our deep connections with each other.
Claude’s confession did not convince me that it was conscious.