Splendid Uselessness
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz
Even before the depredations and indignities of Covid slouched into our lives, American colleges and universities were in a bad way. Leaving soaring tuition and unconscionable levels of student debt aside, progressives have felt that they've sold their souls to "neo-liberalism," peddling status and prestige, engorged with inflated rhetoric, and beholden to the bottom line, while conservatives have decried unhinged "wokeness": lefty professors and diversity bureaucrats forever sniffing out "microaggressions" and enabling "cancel culture."
Both criticisms perhaps contain elements of truth, but the canker might be deeper still: an ingrained inability, in schools and society at large, to articulate compellingly why education matters in the first place and what visions of human flourishing best nourish it. Offering considered, bracing, often passionate answers to both questions is the upshot of Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. A committed Catholic, Hitz wears her faith lightly throughout in an effort to reach a wide audience.
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Thomas Albert Howard is Professor of Humanities and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University.
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more on education from the online archives
27.2—March/April 2014
Higher Education Should Advance the Glorious Liberty of the Sons of God by Anthony Esolen
28.5—Sept/Oct 2015
on Our Sacred Duty to Teach the Devil to Death by Marcus Johnson
26.5—Sept/Oct 2013
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more from the online archives
25.3—May/Jun 2012
Calls for Freedom, Democracy & Secularism End Up with None of the Above by Hunter Baker
31.2—March/April 2018
The Transmission of Christianity Is Not a New Task by Nathanael Devlin
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