Christopher Lasch and the Limits of Hope - First Things
firstthings.com
Christopher Lasch and the Limits of Hope - First Things
The theater’s rich intellectual inheritance serves as a buffer to society’s recrudescent stupidity. Upholding this legacy seems a more vital role for a critic than operating as a tour guide of commercial entertainments. The survival of our democracy depends on the recovery of our critical thinking skills.
In the past, when I’ve made the case for cri... See more
In the past, when I’ve made the case for cri... See more
Charles McNulty • In defense of criticism: A theater critic asks what good does it do in an upside-down world
Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.
Zohar Atkins • The Liberal Arts Are Dying Because Liberalism is Dying
Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:
- We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.
- We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed flavor-of