"How a Conservative-Led Australia Ended Mass Killings" - http://nyti.ms/1OC1T0u.
"The Challenge of Restoring the ‘Public’ to ‘Public Higher Education,'" The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/1RT5OXw
"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.
"Patriarchal villains? It’s time to re-think St Paul and St Augustine" - http://www.newstatesman.com/node/202018
"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.
"Yes, colleges Do Teach Critical-Thinking Skills, Study Finds" - http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/?p=105930
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.
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.
"The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals," The New York Review of Books - http://bit.ly/1Pz0k37.
Walter Kirn, "If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy," - http://theatln.tc/1MvejBD