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A Constitutional Crisis?
Is the U.S. facing a constitutional crisis, or is it all political theater? This analysis breaks down the escalating tensions between the executive branch and the courts—separating fact from fiction and exploring what’s really at stake for American democracy.02-16-2025
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A Small Boat Across the Mediterranean
Roger BerkowitzI came across this interview by Jeevika Verma with Marilyn Hacker, one of my favorite poets who for some reason I haven’t read in a long while. Verma asks Hacker about her use of form, how “discipline and intimacy work together in a way that might feel contradictory at first but provides a clear path toward open communication.” And then she and Hacker talk about the power of form to convey volatile movements and emotions.
05-07-2023
Our Crisis of Worldly Courage
The biggest obstacle to political action today, Arendt saw, is that we increasingly don’t have ideals for which we are willing to fight. We no longer know What We Are Fighting For. Maurits de Jongh argues that the war in Ukraine has laid bare our uncertainty about those common values that might inspire us to collective action. And he worries that as the world hurdles towards confrontations amongst nuclear powers, the courage needed to act politically may be lacking.04-30-2023
Our Spiritual Crisis
Roger BerkowitzFrancis X. Maier interviews N.S. Lyons, and asks “What are the main factors—political, cultural, technological, spiritual—in our historical moment that cause you the greatest concern?”
04-30-2023
A Climate Constitutionalism
Roger BerkowitzEsmeralda Colombo turns to Hannah Arendt’s work on law, constitutionalism, and participatory democracy to argue for ways to limit state sovereignty and increase citizen participation in government through work on cli
04-23-2023
Artificial Intelligence and The Human Condition
Roger BerkowitzAs we struggle to contemplate the impact of humanly developed but now inhumanly powerful artificially intelligent machines, we would do well to recall some of the lessons Arendt drew already from the victory of science and the modern age. Arendt wrote in the Human Condition that the “mathematization of physics, by which the absolute renunciation of the senses for the purpose of knowing was carried through, had in its last stages the unexpected and yet plausible consequences that every question man puts to nature is answered in terms of mathematical patterns to which no model can ever be adequate, since one would have to be shaped after our sense experience.” For Arendt, this separation between “thought and sense experience” means that man can create a man-made reality that defies the human capacity to understand or predict that world. In a similiar way, Slavoj Zizek approaches the present panic around the rise of artificial intelligence. He argues that what will come from artificial intelligence is not simply domination by those who control them, but surprise on the part of those who have created machines they cannot control.
04-16-2023
Classical Education
Against those who see classical education as “white” or privileged, Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather argue that classical studies in K-12 education should be embraced by activists on both the left and the right. Parham will speak at our Fall Conference “Friendship and Politics.”04-09-2023
Citizens' Assemblies are coming to Portugal
Mauricio Mejia writes about Lisbon joining other cities around the world to revitalize democracy through citizen assemblies. Tomorrow (Monday, April 3rd) we will host a webinar and Q&A about our Fellowship for High School teachers to bring deliberative democracy into the classroom.04-02-2023
Can We Have Race Without Racism?
Subrena Smith and David Livingstone Smith have argued that while DEI programs are important and necessary, they are undone by a fundamental contradiction, the demand to end racism while elevating and preserving the importance of race. The problem, they see, is that race falls apart once it is divorced from its essentialist and biological understanding. For them, “Race was fashioned for nothing that was good,” and the effort to celebrate race is a dangerous game that undermines the laudable goals of DEI programs to vanquish racism. 04-02-2023
When Power Triumphed Over Ideals
Roger BerkowitzOn the 20th anniversary of America’s war in Iraq, there is a whole lot of taking stock. James Bennet argues that the War in Iraq helped undermine the American consensus at home and around the world. It is the cynicism that the Iraq war unleashed that opened the door for the rise of Donald Trump at home and other demagogues abroad.
03-25-2023