Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Continue reading “Slow Reveals”At a time when white masculinity has driven what Barbara Tuchman called “the persistence of unwisdom in government” to new depths, narratives like Mbue’s and Nguyen’s could not be more important, nor more welcome.
Continue reading “Empathy and Irony”But then along comes “Behold the Dreamers,” a debut novel by a young woman from Cameroon that illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Continue reading “Empathy and Cultural Dislocation”When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to the position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy.
Barack Obama, in Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
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.
Continue reading “The Smile of Oneness”A worldview that sees the world as perfect at every moment through a coincidence of opposites and an insistence on absolute simultaneity leaves no place for action in the world, specifically in the pursuit of social justice.
Photos: The Oberlin Review, Penguin Books
Continue reading “Holding the Self Lightly”Language has adhesive properties…, drawing us together by enabling us to share our stories…. By inviting us into another’s skin, novels encourage us to practice empathy. And good novels celebrate the myriad complexities of individuals by creating ample room for all characters to have a voice.
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Continue reading “The Many Ages of Wisdom”Picture in your mind a wise man or wise woman. Chances are you imagined someone of advanced age—Dumbledore not Harry Potter, The Matrix’s Oracle not Trinity.
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
Continue reading “In Praise of Small Sanities”No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom…. Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory.
Adam Gopnick, In Praise of Small Sanities
Continue reading “Does Wisdom Lean Left?”Wisdom does not “lean left” so much as “lean liberal.” If wisdom has a party, it is the party of philosophical liberalism and its historic fellow traveler, liberal education.