“The Return of the Native,” Adam Gopnik’s report on Michael Ignatieff is, for me, a kind of literary perfect storm in which a swirl of my own interests coalesce: a cultural critic like Gopnik (an old favorite), talking about a Canadian political philosopher (who has risen to leadership of the Liberal Party in Canada) who…
Drew Gilpin Faust’s essay, “The University’s Crisis of Purpose” is worth a read. While, in typical R-1 fashion, she seems to forget that universities are also about educating people, and not just the advancement of research, she rightly “deplores the growing dominance of economic justifications for universities.” There are, she emphasizes, a whole host of…
The folks at the Immanent Frame have been hosting a series of posts on “Summer Reading,” asking a range of scholars from the social sciences and humanities to look back on the their reading from the season that’s passing, and to look ahead to what’s in store for the fall. It’s a wonderfully diverse array…
I was only three lines into Frederic Jameson’s review of Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Year of the Flood, when I clicked over and ordered the book. Sounds fantastic: Orwellian, McCarthy-ish dystopia suffused with “religion”–conceived in a way that stretches our categories (as I’ve been trying to do in recent work on methodological assumptions in…
Lou Marinoff provides a compelling peek inside the process a philosophy department goes through when doing a hire. (For example, while a position at City College CUNY might be a particularly coveted position, it’s still jarring to read that they received 637 applications for 1 job.) This should be sobering reading for any young scholar…
While summer 2010 seems a long ways off, I’ve already been thinking ahead as I’ve been working on the syllabus for a course I’ll be teaching at Regent College in Vancouver. I jumped at the opportunity because this will provide a chance to indulge my interests at the intersection of theology and literature. The course…