“Part of the discomfort generated by some of MacFarquhar’s case studies is to do with a sense that some people are looking almost obsessively for a scheme of ideas that will assure them beyond doubt that they are doing what is right. The more sympathetic figures in this book are those who ruefully acknowledge that their moral maximalism cannot ever quite deliver this and that the human cost along the way may be disturbingly high; or those whose generosity has about it some dimension of warmth or joy as well as effectiveness.”

"Grace Notes," - https://literaryreview.co.uk/?p=8474

“Eight years before, a Cal State San Bernardino student named Syed Rizwan Farook was enrolled in the World of Islam course. Doueiri had to dig to discover this fact: He’s not sure he taught Farook, and if he did, he has no memory of him. Now Farook’s identity was, with that of his wife, Tashfeen Malik, seared into recent history as the architect of the worst mass shooting in the U.S. since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Federal officials have said they are investigating the attack as an act of terror. And so Doueiri was in class late on a Monday to deliver something more than the typical class lecture. ‘At this point in time, some of you may be so traumatized,’ Doueiri told the class. ‘We’ve just got to be careful how...we express our sorrow.’”

"Cal State San Bernardino Class on Islamic World Grapples with Students' Questions about Shooting" - http://lat.ms/1P8bo5L. I'm often asked what university studies of religion can do in response to such violence. The San Bernadino case provides sobering evidence that the perpetrator actually studied Islam at the regional university. The difficulty is that studies of religion depends on a context of reasonable reflection, cognitive empathy and a willingness to take perspectives other than one's own. Sadly, educators have little more to say to the insanity of violent extremism than to mourn and call for peaceful restraint. Nonetheless, our imperative after such events remains to help those wishing to think more constructively about such matters. It seems to me that this is precisely what Professor Doueiri is providing in his classes. Moreover, this is what motivates the American Academy of Religion to provide two responses against both anti-muslim rhetoric as well as recent changes to campus concealed gun carry laws. 

“In the continuing debate over how to stop mass killings in the United States, Australia has become a familiar touchstone... ‘Firearm suicides fell more in states that had more guns bought back than in states with fewer guns bought back,’ Ms. Neill said in an email. ‘Firearm homicides also fell more in states with more guns bought back, but the effect was smaller than for firearm suicides.’ The data also indicates that overall homicide and suicide rates fell in the decade after 1996, meaning Australians did not respond to the gun control measures by killing one another or themselves using other weapons at higher rates. Over all, Mr. Leigh and Ms. Neill estimate that at least 200 lives are saved annually because of Australia’s gun buyback program.”

"How a Conservative-Led Australia Ended Mass Killings" - http://nyti.ms/1OC1T0u. 

“But the problem college advocates face as they try to shift the conversation to the public good is that there is little agreement on the means and measures to show those benefits. In contrast, state and federal governments have established several ways to link wages to college degrees and, in some cases, have criticized majors they perceive as having little economic value. The associations at the meeting have begun various efforts to change how college success is measured. In particular, the land-grant-university group has started the Post-Collegiate Outcomes Initiative to examine both the public and the personal economic and social capital that is generated by higher education. In an era of increased accountability, higher education needs to include both perspectives, Jonathan R. Alger, president of James Madison University, told attendees. ‘Our philosophy majors do a lot with the skill sets we give them,’ he said. ‘We need to tell that story.’”

"The Challenge of Restoring the ‘Public’ to ‘Public Higher Education,'" The Chronicle of Higher Education -  http://bit.ly/1RT5OXw

“I furthermore regard the function of self-understanding as vital, for this was always coupled with a socially integrative function. This was the case as long as religious world views and metaphysical doctrines stabilized the collective identities of religious communities. But even after the end of the ‘Age of World-Views,’ the pluralized and individualized self-understanding of citizens retains an integrative element in modern societies. Since the secularization of state authority, religion can no longer meet the requirement of legitimizing political rule. As a result, the burden of integrating citizens shifts from the level of social to the level of political integration, and this means: from religion to the fundamental norms of the constitutional state, which are rooted in a shared political culture. These constitutional norms, which secure the remainder of collective background consent, draw their persuasive power from the repeatedly renewed philosophical argumentation of the rational law tradition and political theory.”

"Critique and Communication: Philosophy's Missions - a Conversation with Jürgen Habermas," Eurozine - http://bit.ly/1OazFb2. An insightful interview that provides a concise summary of Habermas's conception of the philosophical task today. An open set of questions arises from the integrative capacity of his account of hermeneutics. Moreover, part of the difficulty arises from his oversimplified opposition between religious and philosophical systems of thought. 

“Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo are usually regarded as pantomime villains by right-thinking moderns. Any number of historical outrages and injustices have been laid at their door, jointly and severally; patriarchal oppression, collusion in slavery, the Inquisition, the collective Christian neurosis about sexuality – almost everything except the common cold.... But perhaps the central fact to bear in mind is that they both do something that only a few other ancient authors do – Plato being the other most obvious example: they invite their readers to imagine a social order quite different from what is now taken for granted.”

"Patriarchal villains? It’s time to re-think St Paul and St Augustine" - http://www.newstatesman.com/node/202018

“What a clever device the book is. It is compact and light, yet contains hundreds of pages that hold an incredible amount of information. Moving forward or backward in the text is as easy as flipping a page, while the book’s square shape and flat bottom facilitates easy shelving. Still, the object is useless if the information it contains cannot be found. And so tools were developed to help the reader do just that, such as page numbers, running titles, and indices. As familiar as these aids may be, they are older than you think... Crucially, to look up information in a book you must have first located the object. And so the shelfmark was invented, the equivalent of our call number. By the end of the medieval period it had become as clever as the book to which it was added: letters, digits, and even colour coding was used to guide the reader to a particular manuscript.””

"Judging a Book by its Cover," - http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/11/11/judging-a-book-by-its-cover/. This is an interesting article on the later medieval development of the codex book. So much of what we think of the book today (its titled covers, page numbers, paragraphs, spaces between words, and various other navigation aids) took hundreds of years to develop and become commonplace in libraries and scriptoriums. My own work looks back to the rise of the early codex itself, which occurred before these useful features. This raises a question concerning why Christians adopted the codex so rigorously, given its relative uselessness as an information technology in the second century. 

“Educators, policy makers, and employers all want colleges to teach students critical-thinking skills, but are colleges succeeding in doing so? To answer that question, the study’s authors analyzed 71 research reports published over the past 48 years. Their conclusion: Yes, despite arguments to the contrary, students’ critical-thinking skills do improve in college. The difference is comparable to a student whose critical-thinking skills start at the 50th percentile and, after four years in college, move up to the 72nd.”

"Yes, colleges Do Teach Critical-Thinking Skills, Study Finds" - http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/?p=105930

“From the title of Russell Blackford’s response, I can tell that we agree on at least one thing: Fawlty Towers was a brilliant television series. I suspect we agree on a few other things as well, such as the wisdom of the separation of church and state - but before we get to the agreement, there are some misunderstandings that need to be cleared up.”

William Cavanaugh and Russell Blackford, "Putting Religion in its Place: The Secular State and Human Flourishing - A Debate" - http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/06/24/4031567.htm. I just came across this exchange between Russell Blackford, based at Newcastle, and William Cavanaugh based in Chicago. Both are incisive and generous in their responses to each other, and both of their recent books are well worth reading. A few years ago Blackford kindly presented at our university's Religion in Political Life seminar series on the release of Freedom of Religion and the Secular State. I find Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence, quite useful for generating discussion in courses on processes of secularization and religious violence. In any case, it is always good to see civility and a bit of humor between thinkers of different positions. 

“Still, the notion of reality or existence that the new realism proposes remains tepid. For Gabriel, to exist means to appear in what he, in reference to Wittgenstein’s later notion of language games, calls a ‘field of sense’: a finite domain of meaningful connections. Fields of sense — in German, Seinfelde, a play on words that affords Gabriel, a connoisseur of American popular culture, an opportunity to allude to his favorite sitcom — stand in contrast to metaphysical attempts to understand the world as a finite, graspable totality.”

Richard Wolin, "Alternate Realities," The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/1Lt7S2l. Interesting review of new realism in Markus Gabriel's Why the World Does not Exist.