Educating for the Great Conversation
Compulsory education is a contradiction in terms. It is impossible to force a person to learn. We can pass laws, enforce punishments, bribe, cajole, demand, and threaten,…
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Rens Bod. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. A New…
Rediscovering the Humanities on Open With Erich Prince
VoegelinView editor Paul Krause joined Erich Prince, the editor of Merion West, on his podcast Open With Erich Prince to discuss VoegelinView, Eric Voegelin, the artistic and…
Can the Humanities Save Us?
I was recently asked by a student group at my university to participate in a panel discussion about the humanities. Having been asked the rather loaded question,…
Globalism, Technology . . . and the Humanities?
I would like you to imagine the following situation: Sometime after graduation a college student is hired as an intern at his university’s newly founded Center for…
Why the Humanities Matter
The decline of the humanities in American higher education – literature, history, philosophy, classical studies, linguistics, and foreign languages – is most recently evident in the drop…
Why The Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education
Why The Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education. Lee Trepanier, ed. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. This book promises to tell the reader why the…
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. The crisis of the humanities…
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Rens Bod. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. A New…
“Only Collect[ing] the Fragments”: The Inadequacy of an Entirely Secular Approach to the Liberal Arts
Commenting in 1940 about the perspective that had given modern education its fundamentally secular character, the sociologist Florian Znankecki spoke of “the deeply stimulating conviction that man,…
A Possible Paradigm for the Humanities in the University Today
In my essay, "The Place of the Humanities in the University Today," I reviewed some of the major critiques of the humanities and its subsequent failed strategies…
The Place of the Humanities in the University Today
The decline of the humanities in American higher education – literature, history, philosophy, classical studies, linguistics, and foreign languages – is most recently evident in the drop…
If I Didn’t Laugh I’d Cry: An Essay on Happiness, Productivity, and the Death of Humanities Education
I am not happy these days. I teach in the humanities at a Canadian University. And – unlike my more Protestant-minded, less eudemonistical colleagues – I think…