I look at the practice of democracy not so much as a fixed set of procedural requirements, but as a process that needs to have certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that define where people are in relation to each other.
The rate of change, the kinds of change, and the scope of change taking place today are impossible to understand without also looking at the ways they are affecting societies and how we understand and experience ourselves and others.
We no longer experience a world, or sense ourselves as the subject of that experience; we are, rather, shrouded and carried along in the moodiness of the present.
The available terms for making better sense of the human predicament are plentiful, but most are currently buried beneath layers of exhausted soil.
We know very little about what we are doing, why we do it, or how we feel about it.
The Kinsey agenda remains alive as key justifications for counting up sexual acts.
What is a Catholic philosopher?
With the rise of humanism and modern critical scholarly practices in subsequent centuries, texts began to be treated as material objects to be fixed and plumbed for meaning.
Coming to terms with our most basic instincts is another thing we learn through boxing.
The solution to the unraveling of the social contract of employment may not be to prop up the ailing traditional job but, instead, to imagine what other forms work lives might take.
Within cities themselves, new wealth has been greeted with great fanfare—except by those who see gentrification as a threat to the communities that remained during the decades of white flight.
A hangover is about being poisoned, no doubt. The toxins linger in the body and must be expelled, or waited out. We’re sick with a mini-flu and need to get better. But isn’t a hangover about more than physical toxins, at least some of the time?
The self-made man and the confidence man have existed in dialectical tension down to the present.
Great as they are, the challenges of the digital age are not only profoundly intellectual and conceptual.
At the beginning of the digital revolution, there existed a speculative energy that we could use now. It was put at the service not of innovation or disruption but of maintenance and politics, of establishing categories to put our digital world on a better course.
The fact is, work as we know it isn’t worth saving anyway.
Uncomfortable though it might be to admit, Heidegger’s thinking is part of the Jewish textual tradition.
The principal experience of the art I encountered, I found, was not the art itself, but the uncertainty and complexity of my own subjective response.
We need to learn to see animals for what, and maybe who, they really are.
Social and cultural change, from the rise of the “information economy” to changes in family life to the technological mediation of our relationships, is happening all around us.
Demands on our attention come from the informational environments and shared physical spaces we inhabit. At issue are ethical questions about the conduct of civic life.
Empirical verifiability is great when you can get it. But the worry here is what might happen to our self-understanding as human beings if we become willing to trade in an understanding of a rich and meaning-laden feature of our nature for, well, something we can share with a rat.
What does dominion “over every living thing that moves on the earth” mean? Brute sovereignty and ruthless exploitation? Or thoughtful stewardship and responsible cultivation?