“What is the point of studying the humanities? The question reflects the current climate among humanist educators: anxiety shading into despair... There is no danger, in our hyper-moralized, hyper-political culture, that our young people will somehow fail to be enchanted by the prospect of making a difference. The danger is quite otherwise: that as all human goods are either put to use or discarded in the struggle for social and political ends, we lose our humanity and the dignity it implies. We lose what makes life worth living, whether that is intellectual life or any of the other unutterably precious human activities that dwell in peace and holy uselessness.”

Zena Hitz, "Freedom and Intellectual Life" - First Things

“At the same time that it depicts Saul’s conversion, ‘Son of Saul’ also directly engages the viewer’s subjectivity by its style and mode of presentation; its achievement is to embody the dynamic that is its very subject matter. Kierkegaard called such communication — the only sort he thought befitting a subjective thinker — ‘double reflection.’ He thought this is the only way that the authenticity of the message can be guarded — the only way to avoid being a town crier of subjectivity. In this way, ‘Son of Saul’ is both art and philosophy: It makes inwardness visible. Through its depiction of death and destruction it reminds us how to live.”

Katalin Balog, "'Son of Saul,' Kierkegaard and the Holocaust," The Stone - http://nyti.ms/2150xgH 

“Reagle surveys this varied landscape in pursuit of a goal he calls ‘intimate serendipity,’ his term for successful online communities, places where people are able to express themselves electronically in a civilized way... But in the main, the Web conversation Reagle considers suffers from tendencies similar to the ones Turkle identifies: narcissism, disinhibition, and the failure to care about the feelings of others. It’s a world devoid of empathy.... How can we enjoy the pleasures and benefits of mobile and social media while countering its self-depleting and antisocial aspects? Turkle keeps her discussion of remedy general, perhaps because there aren’t many good solutions at the moment. She thinks we should consciously unitask, cultivate face-to-face conversation, and set limits on ourselves, like keeping devices away from the family dinner table.... Harris wants engineers to consider human values like the notion of ‘time well spent’ in the design of consumer technology... These are helpful suggestions—more thoughtful apps, and apps to control our apps. They also seem wildly inadequate to the problem. ”

"We Are Hopelessly Hooked" - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/we-are-hopelessly-hooked/

“And yet in 2013, despite positive growth overall, the world reached ‘Peak Paper’: global paper production and consumption reached its maximum, flattened out, and is now falling. A prediction that was over-hyped in the 20th century and then derided in the early 2000s – namely, the Paperless Office – is finally being realised. Growth continues, but paper is in retreat. Why did this seem so unlikely only a decade ago?... While the production and consumption of paper has slowed and declined, there has been an explosion in the production and distribution of information of all kinds. That includes digital versions of traditional publications, such as e-books and online newspapers, as well as new kinds of publications such as social media. ”

"Doing More with Less: The Economic Lesson of Peak Paper" - https://aeon.co/opinions/doing-more-with-less-the-economic-lesson-of-peak-paper

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilites; Truth isn’t”

— Mark Twain, Following the Equator; A Journey Around the World, 1897

http://www.archive.org/stream/followingequator00twaiuoft#page/156/mode/2up. I wonder what Derrida might make of this.

“Not as much, I grant, as philosophers need music, but nevertheless the need is real. In the past our musical culture had secure foundations in the church, in the concert hall and in the home. The common practice of tonal harmony united composers, performers and listeners in a shared language, and people played instruments at home with an intimate sense of belonging to the music that they made, just as the music belonged to them. The repertoire was neither controversial nor especially challenging, and music took its place in the ceremonies and celebrations of ordinary life alongside the rituals of everyday religion and the forms of good manners. We no longer live in that world.”

Roger Scruton, "Why Musicians Need Philosophy," - http://www.futuresymphony.org/why-musicians-need-philosophy/

“Roberts seems to be suggesting that physics is a realm apart from say, the humanities, where unique cultural perspectives would be more obviously valuable—and in doing so, he gives voice to a widely held misconception about science. Roberts’s error is to treat physics as a discipline that sits outside its own history and the larger culture, when of course it does no such thing. This was not the view of physics that 70-year-old Albert Einstein described as he looked back across his own life experience [From the time he was 12, he wrote, ‘The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation.’].”

"What Chief Justice Roberts Misunderstands About Physics: Science Is Not a Separate Realm that Sits Outside Culture" - http://theatln.tc/1OyuVzt

“The average annual salary of ‘welders, cutters, solderers, cutters and brazers’ was $40,040 in 2014, according to data from the United States Labor Department. That is basically the same as the median starting salary of newly graduated philosophy majors, which was $39,900, according to data from PayScale Inc. But that compares new college graduates at the start of their careers to welders at all stages of their careers. The median midcareer pay for philosophy majors was $81,200, according to PayScale. In the Labor Department data, postsecondary philosophy and religion teachers earned $71,350. In other words, a college graduate, even in a field that is not commercially oriented like philosophy, typically earns substantially more than a welder by the time they advance beyond the entry-level point of their career.”

"Fact Check: Marco Rubio on Philosophers vs. Welders" - http://nyti.ms/1IKTHKc

“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.