Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Photos: Brittanica (Morrison), Rolling Stone (Miranda), Wikipedia (Bechdel), Brittanica (Erdrich), Massive Science (Le Guin), Harvard Crimson (Adichie), Alan Elkann Interviews (McEwan), Penguin Random House (Ozeki), Wikipedia (Marker)
Continue reading “Wisdom Matters: Reading Literature for a Wiser World”Some moments in human history are clearly wiser than others. In politics, and in social life more generally, ours seems strikingly unwise.
Continue reading “Wisdom in Community”In short, what Alison Bechdel says of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate applies to wisdom as well: “Clearly, [we] need to rethink this thing.”
Portions of this post first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and are reprinted here with permission
Photo: Love Books Review
Continue reading “Reading for Wisdom Today”Cultivating intellectual humility initiates a virtuous circle, the result of which is a greater capacity for wisdom in all its dimensions.
Photo: Entertainment Weekly
Continue reading “Let This Book Give You Heart”Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman
Photo: Ernest Hamlin Baker
Continue reading “The Wisdom to Know the Difference”God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Serenity Prayer
Photo: Medium
Continue reading “A More Novelistic Approach”We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.
Chinua Achebe, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”
Photo: The New York Times
Continue reading “Something Else Stands Beside It”What is both unfortunate and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently the trauma of a diminished existence…. The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
Photo: She Counseling
Continue reading “Trauma and Community”Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel, that—unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the good will of others—art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
Toni Morrison, Roundtable on the Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Continue reading “The Poignancy of Things”Chris Marker’s Sans soleil exemplifies the journey to wisdom, without once mentioning that concept.
Photo: Raphael, The School of Athens (detail), antigonejournal.com
Continue reading “Rethinking Liberal Education”Narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction. Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a sympathetic responsiveness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy.
Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity