Reading for Wisdom Today

Portions of this post first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and are reprinted here with permission

Photo: Love Books Review

Cultivating intellectual humility initiates a virtuous circle, the result of which is a greater capacity for wisdom in all its dimensions.  

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The Wisdom to Know the Difference

Photo: Ernest Hamlin Baker

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

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Simply Human

Photo: Nasty Women Writers

It is only by seeing ourselves as fundamentally other—the contingent product of a culture that has no particular monopoly on truth—that we can come into our wisest possible, most “utterly human” selves.

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Slow Reveals

Photo: Michael Karnavas

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.

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The Novel as Atonement

Photo: Atonement, dir. Joe Wright

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.  And only in a story could you enter into these different minds and show how they had an equal value.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

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