by Jeroen Bouterse

In his Confessions, Augustine remembers his state after the death of a beloved childhood friend. He writes: “Everywhere I looked I saw death. […] My eyes sought him everywhere, and did not see him. I hated all places because he was not in them.” An unfailingly moving passage, and a testament to Augustine’s power as a thinker – for profound as his account of his loss is, we are already being led along for a much bigger point. Almost immediately, Augustine moves on to chastise his former self: “fool that I was then, enduring with so much rebellion the lot of every man”. A soul that tethers itself to mortal things, rather than lifting itself up to God, will naturally be bloodied when it inevitably loses them.

I was brought back to these passages by the parallels with Christopher Beha’s account in Why I am not an atheist (2026). Beha is modest enough to suggest less exalted models, but of course he is aware of the echo of Augustine. It’s not just that this is another account of an intellectual who returns to the Catholic faith. Beha also shares with the Church father the admirable skill of rendering now-abandoned perspectives with a language that makes their original pull understandable. Here he looks back on his thoughts after nearly losing a friend:

“I still had so much to lose, and I would eventually lose all of it. Everyone I loved would be taken from me, unless I was taken from them first.”

Like Augustine, Beha finds powerful and honest words for a state of mind he used to inhabit, but makes sure these words contain the seeds of self-criticism too. At this point in the narrative, Beha’s meditations on suffering and death push him away from religion; after a book-long journey through godless alternatives, however, he will find a less self-absorbed form of love, one presumably more resilient to the thoughts that dislodged him from his faith. Read more »

Another Piece of Eternity

I’m peeling back a page reading a new day
by the light of a new sun.

Mom died years ago,
or was it yesterday?

I once read something similar by Camus
but was too new to understand that time bleeds,
its dyes are not fast but run between years
and sometimes as in old cloth the colors of time
become homogeneous,

……but here’s this day blaring like a fanfare
……from a new horn crisp as frost on glass
……its brink sharp as the edge of a blade
……slicing off another piece of eternity

by Jim Culleny 4/29/12
from Odder Still
Leana’s Basement Press, 2015

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by Tim Sommers

Having previously discussed Ethics Bowl here, I can’t resist bragging just a little, tiny bit.

On Sunday, May 8 in St. Louis, Missouri the Ethics Bowl team from William & Mary – our team! – became the 2026 APPE International Ethics Bowl® Champions. The crew on the stage, led by Team Founder/Coach Bernardo Jimez, won the trophy with the support of the whole William and Mary team. For discussion, research and analysis, participation in other Bowls, and practice, practice, practice, the team also includes Teddy Friesz, Chaewon Kang, Nicholas Leonard, Lydia Kipp, Sheoli Lele, Dani Munrayos, Ben Schatz, and Harper Willim. Oh. And me. The humble Faculty Advisor/Coach.

Ethics Bowl focuses on a small number of sensitive, controversial, and challenging cases of applied ethics with new cases coming out every semester. The Championship Bowl featured fifteen cases including, what to do about a hypothetical billionaire experimenting with geoengineering to mitigate global climate change without cooperating with any nation or group? Can medical professionals who refuse to be vaccinated or give vaccinations be justifiably limited in completing clinical rotations or securing a residency? How are our views of consent and intimacy perniciously influenced by reality television? Is it immoral to idolize so Luigi Mangione, the man who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare?

It interesting to watch such a diverse and intelligent and motivated group of people – not just my team, all the teams – focus so single-mindedly on a relatively small set of ethical questions. It taught me a few lessons over the last few years – or at least raised some issues I am still ruminating over. Here are three. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Something about Hamlet makes us want to love him, some mysterious quality of his being. I was maybe 15 or 16 when I first met the Prince and sitting next to Boots Schneider at the Olivier movie which had just opened in New York. Yet Hamlet held my attention even more than her hand because somehow he was saying things I had always wanted to say, but not only did I not know how to say them, up to that moment I didn’t know I wanted to say them. What I wanted to say had something to do with authority, something to do with those large figures who hold in their hands the powers of the world, something to do with the joy of saying to Polonius “Excellent well, you are a fishmonger,” and some kind of recognition of Hamlet’s deep sense of betrayal. This is the Prince’s dominant emotion, the feeling that lacerates his being, and his perception of the world is accurate; he has been  betrayed.

There are the human betrayals: his uncle usurps his throne; his mother marries with that uncle so fast, so fast; his  girl withdraws her presence; his young friends come and, for a moment, he looks to them for comfort, but it is soon clear that he is their stepping stone to royal favor. He is betrayed by the old as well, by what they have learned to call wisdom and how they are satisfied with it – for surely it is true that for the  first part of the play Hamlet’s real opposite is Polonius. What is more opposite to the philosopher than the philosophizer?

There are the non-human betrayers. As he is betrayed by Wisdom, he is betrayed by Vocation. He is called to be a king and yet he is not king. He is betrayed by Death who has carried  his father away (and by his father who has allowed death to carry him off – for is that not one of the great betrayals? Our parents die and leave nothing, no barrier, no guard for us between this world and the next). And as fearful as this is, when his father returns, there is a worse betrayal, for his father wants revenge, and what worse thing can a parent do to a child than to make that child live out or finish up the parent’s destiny and not urge the child to find his own own? Revenge would be the completion of the older Hamlet’s life, not the growth of a life out of the seeds of the young man’s own being. Some too have suggested that Hamlet is betrayed by his own five wits. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

There are many things about who we are that we take for granted yet can still find mysterious. Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? Why do we sing and dance? Why do we laugh? Another, perhaps, is why do we get angry at inanimate objects? You might pinch your finger on a closing door and pound the door in payback. Your car won’t start in the morning and you slap the steering wheel. Your laptop crashes and you swear at it.

We all know better. Doors don’t act on their own. Cars don’t have minds. Laptops don’t have feelings. Yet we still behave, at least in the moment, as if they do. The Stoic philosopher Seneca in his essay “On Anger,” written two thousand years ago, observed how irrational it is to get angry at inanimate objects. He commented we can be angry at “inanimate things, such as the manuscript which we often hurl from us because it is written in too small script or tear up because it is full of mistakes, or the article of clothing which we pull to pieces because we do not like them.”  He went on: “But how foolish it is to get angry at these things, which neither deserve our wrath nor feel it! . . . it is the act of a madman to get angry at things without life …” (Trans. John W. Basose; Loeb Classical Library.)

Even Jesus is not spared from this apparent madness. One morning Jesus was hungry and “he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only,  and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward ever, And presently the fig tree withered away.” (KJ V Matthew 21:18-19.)  Yes, even Jesus could get “hangry,” and getting angry at a tree makes no more sense than getting mad at a rock. (Maybe for that reason some take the story as an allegory about the spiritual barrenness of the times.)

Stoics had a term for immediate, involuntary, automatic reactions, such as blushing, or yelping when jostled: “propatheia,” which roughly means “pre-emotion.” These reactions are treated as essentially forgivable human physiological and psychological reactions of the moment. Immediately hitting back at  a door that pinched your finger might fall in this category. But  according to Stoics letting such a reaction grow into  sustained anger means surrendering to unnecessary and unhelpful passion. And to allow the reaction to blossom into full-fledged  destructive acts like tearing up manuscripts or clothes, as Seneca suggested, is irrational and unacceptable.

Nevertheless, there is a long history of taking formal and deliberative actions against objects where the concept of “propatheia” seems not to apply. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

There’s a certain problem with the status of the word “criticism” in the phrase “literary criticism.” The critical part seems to be concerned, as criticism is in general, with separating the wheat from the chaff, but the literary part seems already to have made a judgement about quality – as long as we take term “literary” to be evaluative and not referring to a particular genre, distinct from the many forms of popular, commercial fiction. There is a curious void between judgement and analysis in literary studies; in one sense, you are working with a set of texts that have “survived,” that have survived a crucial filter of judgement to become worthy of intense study. Even if literary critical methods can be fruitfully applied to “forgotten works” or even non-literary cultural artifacts, this is an elevating of the object’s status; we don’t do the work of digging out a novel from some hidden corner of the 19^th century just to pronounce, finally, that it’s worthless. Literary criticism has thus evolved into thinking of itself as something like an empirical study, which observes but is expected, like polite patrons of a theater, not to judge, at least not too loudly.

In my years as a student of literary studies, I don’t think I encountered – from my professors, at any rate – much literary criticism which was devoted to the evaluative enterprise. If a work of secondary quality was to be discussed, it was under the assumption that it had something of value to say, faults and all. I don’t think much has changed in this regard. Perhaps, as we struggle to define a place for literary study in universities being run like intellectual private equity funds, we ought to reconsider this approach. When evaluation is occurring, it usually happens on the basis of some political failing, some inconsistency with modern moral standards in the object work. I’m talking about something much more basic: students, quite simply, are not being told they have permission to say “this sucks” on a strictly aesthetic basis. This is a shame, because there is both value and a kind of joy in not only declaring that something sucks, but also in carefully teasing out exactly why it sucks. Read more »

Three mountains. Looking northward from Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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NEW POSTS BELOW

by Lei Wang

I’ve been under the weather for about three weeks now: not so incapacitated as to make watching bad TV the only respite, but not quite well either. A persistent, on-off sniffleupagal achiness. The CDC says respiratory illness rates in Iowa right now are Very High, the highest it’s been in years, and I was relieved to hear I was not imagining my woes. Anecdotally, I know something has been going around (many of my friends and 1/3 of my singing a.k.a. breathing in each others’ faces group was sick last week). But some part of me still thinks perhaps I am making up my own symptoms, afraid that my physical lackadaisicality is just moral lassitude, an excuse for avoiding my book and other productivities.

I have written before about how my best friend and I luxuriate in those times when we feel totally “off the hook” from the things we feel so much pressure to accomplish: times of sickness and travel, when you are socially privileged to find respite in creature comforts. But to be only mildly malaised is to be in purgatory, and I feel anew for those with chronic illness and fatigue—to be not just under the weather but under the climate. Esme Wang famously offers a course on writing with limitations—the Unexpected Shape Academy—which includes tips for bursts of writing on the phone or notecards or from bed, rather than long laptop sessions. I wrote this column mostly via texts to myself, and now I sound rather virtuous, but I assure you I do not feel that way.

The other night, in a limbo state of foggy brain, I was lolling about the house in the presence of someone who I admired as Very Efficient. He had been home-schooled and unlike other home-schooled kids who wasted their time without official structure, he finished his schoolwork and then read several extra books a day. Before we started dating, he went to the library’s private closet-sized study rooms on weekends to do college physics problems without interruption for 10 hours straight (he does not study or work in anything relevant to physics). That night, he was reading a thick book about the Cold War, after having already read a thinner book on it. He felt like a laser, and I felt like a lump.

And I noticed how I wanted to have him be gone, so I could be an unperceived potato by myself, which is what I like about living alone. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Jonathan Kujawa

For several years now, the AI companies have been using the annual Putnam exam as one of these benchmarks. The Putnam exam is taken every December by thousands of undergraduates around the world. It has twelve problems, each worth ten points, for a total of 120 points. The exam notoriously difficult [1]. Earning two points on the exam puts you in the top 50%. If you’d like to try this year’s questions, you can find them along with their solutions here.

As this article describes, a number of AI systems were tested against this year’s Putnam exam. The best of them scored 103 points, putting it among the top three humans. Even the worst model earned 58 points, making it comparable to the human ranked 78th (out of the 4329 who took the exam).

One advantage of this benchmark is the Putnam problems are written from scratch every year. It is unlikely that the AI systems are simply repeating answers they’ve seen in their training data [2]. On the other hand, comparing AI Putnam results with those of humans is rather artificial. The AI systems can throw massive amounts of effort against the problems. If you gave me a million well-trained undergraduates in a windowless data center, I bet I could generate a pretty impressive solution set [3]. Read more »

by Robert Jensen

Not so long ago, the conventional wisdom in most liberal/left circles was that people concerned about population growth tended to be racists, nativists, and eugenicists. And mostly old white guys, according to a leading UK environmental writer.

“It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed,” wrote George Monbiot.

That description was a caricature when Monbiot wrote it, but today’s wealthiest white men (think Elon Musk) are more likely to advocate population expansion, not reduction. Environmentalists who highlight the problem of population growth—the threats to the health of ecosystems from too many people consuming too much—can’t be dismissed with slurs and stereotypes.

Nandita Bajaj—who is brown, female, and definitely not wealthy—defies those stereotypes. She chose not to have children and has dedicated her life to research and advocacy on behalf of women, vulnerable people, animals, and planetary health. Bajaj is executive director of Population Balance, a group that includes no racists, nativists, or eugenicists. Instead, its members face tough questions about the trajectory of the outsized human presence on Earth. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Who’s Jealous?!. Celestun, Mexico, March 2025.

Digital photograph.

More here.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

When people hear that we should empathize with our adversaries, the reaction is often uneasy. Empathy sounds like softness. It sounds like moral compromise, even capitulation. Why should we try to understand those who compete with us, oppose us, or even threaten us?

The confusion lies in a simple mistake. Empathy is not sympathy. To empathize with someone is not to agree with them, excuse them, or endorse their actions. It is only to attempt to see the world as they see it, to understand what they fear, what they value, and what they believe they must defend. As Ralph White of the United States Information Agency put it, it’s the ability to step into someone else’s skin and experience the world through their eyes. We rarely need to exert ourselves to empathize with friends; shared assumptions do most of the work. It is with adversaries that empathy becomes difficult, and therefore essential. When trust is low and stakes are high, misunderstanding becomes dangerous. Two Cold War episodes make the point, in opposite ways.

The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. We now know that the Soviet missile deployment in Cuba was larger and more advanced than American officials understood at the time. A small miscalculation could have triggered catastrophe and the deaths of hundreds of millions. During those tense days, Nikita Khrushchev sent President Kennedy two communications. One was public and defiant. The other was private and conciliatory in tone. The instinctive response that Kennedy was considering was to answer the public challenge directly, to demonstrate strength.

At that moment, one man in the room possessed something rare: lived familiarity with the adversary. Read more »

by Jim Hanas

As the Pew Research Center reported last week, more than half of Americans think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.” The U.S. had the dimmest view of their neighbors among the twenty-five countries surveyed and Canada had the brightest. Only 8% of Canadians think their fellow citizens are bad.

Pew floats a few ideas about why this is, the first being political polarization. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to see their fellow citizens as bad, though this is consistent across countries for parties out of power. The study also considers that Americans are more judgmental than people in other countries, but finds that—on particular issues—this does not seem to be the case. Americans are, in general, more lenient on acts—save for the perennial culture war weapons of abortion and homosexuality—but tougher on persons, which has the ring of truth. 

Evidence that Americans have reached the point of irreconcilability abounds. Take the recent HBO docuseries Neighbors, a must-see for connoisseurs of what I call “hard cringe.” Soft cringe features awkward social situations but gives viewers occasional relief via punchlines and pratfalls. Curb Your Enthusiasm and the mad cap antics of The Chair Company are soft cringe confections. Hard cringe, on the other hand, comes from Sweden, dating back to Bergman’s Persona and erupting most recently with Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Force Majeure. Hard cringe gives viewers no lifeline and no cues; no permission to breathe, let alone laugh. Ironically, a Canadian—Nathan Fielder—is its leading North American purveyor.

Each episode of Neighbors braids together two unrelated disputes with the lyricism of Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Two sets of preppers in the middle of nowhere can’t agree about a gate. A Vietnam vet and a former male stripper can’t agree who is stalking whom. The creators say the series emerged from their pandemic obsession with watching neighborhood dispute videos on YouTube. It is difficult to watch, as American grown-ups try—and repeatedly fail—to establish the minimal common ground needed to resolve what appear to be incredibly trivial disputes. Violence frequently seems inevitable. Read more »

Driver’s License Renewal Photo

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by John Allen Paulos

What do you call someone who is not religious? There are a lot of choices, but is there a need for a new name for such people? And, whatever they’re called, should not politicians more fully acknowledge them? The philosopher Daniel Dennett and others years ago pushed for the adoption of a new term to signify someone who holds a naturalistic (as opposed to a religious) worldview. They stressed the need for such a term by noting that so many million Americans are atheists, agnostics, or (the largest category) have no religion of preference. I say “so many” because estimating the number is difficult, although 75 million is often mentioned as an estimate.

Polls are a crude instrument for describing those professing so many varieties and degrees of human belief and disbelief. This is especially so with polls that rely on self‑reporting to measure the extent of possibly unpopular opinions. For this and other reasons the number of non-believers may be much higher than most people realize. This brings me to “Brights,” the problematic term that was proposed in 2003 as a way to refer to non‑religious people. The coinage is due to Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, who started an online group intended to further the influence of “Brights.”

On their site they wrote, “Currently the naturalistic worldview is insufficiently expressed within most cultures.” They stated “There is a great diversity of persons who have a naturalistic worldview. Under this broad umbrella, as Brights, these people can gain social and political influence in a society infused with supernaturalism.”

Looking back on this neologism, I don’t think a degree in public relations was needed to predict that many people would construe the term as smug, silly, and arrogant. It’s also simplistic and reductive. Any such attempt to categorize people’s beliefs should recognize that many people who nominally identify with this or that religion still have a naturalistic perspective, not a religious one. Obviously people’s attitudes may be a blend of sorts, something akin to non-binary, but in an epistemic sense and not a gendered one. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

I’m someone who’ll finish a book once I’ve started it, even if I don’t like it very much. Yes, I’m superstitious. If a particular book falls into my hands, I suspect fate may have had some purpose in putting it there. When Steve Bergsman’s I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins popped up in my Amazon recommendations, I hesitated to swipe past it. Who knows but that this book was dropped into the algorithmic stream for the purpose of delivering me into some higher wisdom?

Deliver me it did not—or at least I didn’t give it the chance, setting the book aside halfway through. But Bergsman’s well-researched biography got me thinking about race, performance, and the peculiar moral economy of show business. Best of all, it revived dormant memories of a famous gal named Minnie—and I don’t mean the mouse.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was a rhythm-and-blues singer whose song “I Put a Spell on You” became a kind of underground hit in 1956. But what kept him famous was his outrageous stage show. In its heyday, Hawkins would jump out of a closed coffin, dressed in what he called a “cannibal” outfit, complete with loincloth, war paint, and a plastic bone through his nose. He stalked the stage with a skull on a stick, with a cigarette stuck in its mouth.

As an artist, he seemed to have little constituency among his own race but was patronized—first by promoters, and later by white hipsters, who went to his concerts, put him in movies, and declared “I Put a Spell on You” one of “The 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll” (Rolling Stone). Hawkins’ career sat squarely on a discomfiting seam in twentieth-century popular music, where it is hard to separate elevation from exploitation in a business that soils nearly everyone who enters it. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Last year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I chose several values to focus on during the year. One of these values was comfort and ease. Well, 2025 was an anxious and uncomfortable year in the U.S., and I’m not sure how much I actually did to make my life more comfortable. But I began to learn about my relationship to comfort, and to see that I simultaneously long for it and distrust it as an indulgence. Lately I’ve been trying to reconcile that tension.

When I thought about my ambivalent views of comfort, I started to pay more attention to the ways that we as a culture denigrate comfort. One example of a negative view is the pop psychology advice about getting out of your comfort zone. The proponents of this advice describe the comfort zone as a place of stasis, idleness, or insufficient effort. The idea is that leaving this zone—by doing something that’s new to you, difficult, or otherwise challenging—is crucial to learning and growth.

I’ve always been leery of this advice. I’ve had a vague sense that the comfort zone was a concept borrowed from the corporate world and then applied in other contexts where it might be inappropriate. In addition, I tend to associate it with a focus on performance, that is, human activity that’s evaluated according to some measure—performance on a task or job, say, or athletic or musical performance. These characteristics alone make it less than compelling to me.

I’m also wary of the word growth, even in the phrase personal growth, when the context is that you should push yourself to grow. People sometimes need to rest, or tend to their own physical needs or those of others. Pleasure and enjoyment are vital as ends in themselves. Life is about more than growth. Read more »