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    JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times Conference poster

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    “JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times”

    October 16 – 17

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Amor Mundi

The weekly newsletter of the Hannah Arendt Center
What is most difficult, writes Arendt, is to love the world as it is. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection, but the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is. The opinions expressed in essays on our site are those of their authors.

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About

About

Amor Mundi (for love of the world) is an exploration of Arendtian topics delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. This includes deep dives into the works of Hannah Arendt and the implications of her ideas on the world today. We feature varied, nuanced, and often opposing viewpoints in this non-partisan publication, and brave and provocative ideas that will help you (re)discover the joy of deep thinking and caring about the world.

When you subscribe to the newsletter, you'll also receive first-hand updates on what we’re doing at HAC (conferences, events, workshops, etc.), an Arendt Quote of the Week with in-depth analysis from Arendt scholars from around the world, and highlights of the work being done on campus by our Student Fellows. Be among the first to know about special offers from our partners and upcoming events!

We've been publishing weekly essays here on our website since 2010, and are now transitioning to the publication platform Medium. You can still read for free with links from our email each Sunday! But now you can highlight sections and comment, too!

Browse our Library of Amor Essays on Medium
 

A note to new Medium users: if you see an offer pop-up, just simply X out to close and continue reading. You can also Follow HAC on Medium and Subscribe to our publications, to receive additional notifications so you don't miss an essay. 

  • Image for The Radical Politics of Joy
    The Radical Politics of Joy
    "Is Joy really what Arendt wants us to be talking about, amidst the most racist, cruel, and criminal American administration since the Civil Rights era?" So asked one of my favorite former students, protesting the theme of this year's Hannah Arendt Center Conference: JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times.

    READ MORE
  • Image for Civil Disobedience and the Spirit of American Democracy
    Civil Disobedience and the Spirit of American Democracy
    Hannah Arendt wrote that, “Dissent implies consent, and is the hallmark of free government.” We are at a moment when dissent is required if we are to preserve our freedoms.

    READ MORE
  • Image for Temptations of Tyranny
    Temptations of Tyranny
    “If this isn’t tyranny, what is?” So asks Rod Dreher, one of President Trump’s most steadfast intellectual supporters, now increasingly alarmed by the President’s abuses of power.

    READ MORE
  • Image for An Open Letter To My Friends Who Signed “Philosophy for Palestine”
    An Open Letter To My Friends Who Signed “Philosophy for Palestine”
    These are dark times as multiple crises are erupting around the world while talk of a global conflagration is heard in many circles. These are also times that try human relationships, friendships, and alliances.

    READ MORE
Featured Article

Temptations of Tyranny

Rod Dreher’s conflicted support for President Trump illustrates a broader crisis among intellectual conservatives who fear the "soft totalitarianism" of liberal institutions yet embrace the hard authoritarianism of executive overreach. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, the essay contends that true freedom is preserved not through charismatic leaders but through the multiplication and decentralization of citizen power. Revitalizing democracy, it argues, requires stubborn, local acts of collective governance rather than the dangerous temptation to concentrate authority in a single figure.
04-27-2025

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A Look Into Our Spring Social

We were thrilled to have our Arendt Center members, student fellows and the broader Bard community join us at Bard College for our Spring Member Social and End of Year Gathering! Membership is an opportunity to join a rich community of thinkers, writers, activists, scholars. It comes with two free entrances to our Annual Conference in the fall, access to our Virtual Reading Group, and much more!
05-18-2024

On Protests, On Violence and on Hannah Arendt

Two Arendtian scholars at Indiana University in Bloomington have turned to Hannah Arendt to make sense of an incredibly tense situation on the University of Indiana Campus. In recent weeks, police have twice cleared encampments in support of the Palestinians in Gaza. In the midst of such a standoff, Jeff Isaac, a Professor of Political science, published an Open Letter to the students in Dissent Magazine, the journal that once published Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock.”
05-16-2024

Carefully Curating Our Shibboleths

A ceasefire, Zadie Smith writes for The New Yorker, is an ethical demand, not a politics. It is a cri de coeur, and it is natural and right that young people let their hearts cry out. But what would it mean to forego shibboleths and just speak from the heart? Is it possible to scream and yet not trade in overly simplified slogans?
05-11-2024

Permissible But Bad Speech

Danielle Allen makes the important distinction between impossible speech and speech that is permissible and yet bad. She writes, "Permissible but bad speech is like peeing in the swimming pool — it doesn’t break the law, but it violates the norm of respect for others. On college campuses, impermissible speech is met with formal adjudication and sanctions. But how should we respond to permissible but bad speech?"
05-11-2024
Featured

Con-solatio, Compassion, and Friendship

I was honored this week to have been chosen by Con-solatio to receive their annual Compassion Award at a ceremony in New York City. Con-solatio sends missionaries around the world to the poorest and most forlorn places on the planet. The goal is not to convert people or to educate them or to build them houses. It is simply to console them, to show them compassion, to be their friends.
 
05-05-2024

Compassion and Politics

The Arendt Center will host a talk on Thursday this week by Mira Sucharov, a member of the Palestinian-Israeli non-profit A Land For All. The group seeks to imagine a future in which the 15 million inhabitants of Israel-Palestine live together between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. The form of such a togetherness would be a federation in which both Jewish and Palestinian peoples have their own sovereign states and yet live amongst each other.
05-05-2024

René Girard and Internet Influencers

René Girard was one of the great social theorists of the 20th century. His book Violence and the Sacred is a classic account of the problem of violence in society, the way that so many of our religious and legal rituals are designed to quell the human urge for violence and reassert peace. The rituals of sacrifice and even today the ritual of legal punishment allows a community to exercise its desire for violence legally and with priestly sanction on one person or even one sacrificial animal–a scapegoat. The scapegoat can’t be innocent, we must believe our violence against the scapegoat must be justified, even sacred.
04-28-2024
Featured

On Campus Protests

Hannah Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a fundamental right and a distinctly American form of politics. Unlike Henry David Thoreau, who understood civil disobedience as an act of individual conscientious action, Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a form of collective political dissent. It is a group phenomenon that publicizes widely shared minority opinions via extraordinary means to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority.
04-28-2024

Power and the University

George Packer reminds us of the liberal vision of the university and worries that such an ideal is being lost. Packer writes: "A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance . . . When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness."
04-28-2024
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