Amor Mundi

Left Totalitarianism?

By Roger Berkowitz
I continually hope that the right-wing narrative about left-wing intolerance (and even left-wing totalitarianism) is overblown. As a professor at Bard College—a liberal arts college that welcomes and relishes difficult conversations—I hope that the trend of censoring right-wing views is overblown and a passing fad.

Hate

By Roger Berkowitz
I am a few years older than Matt Taibbi, but it turns out we both share an encounter with Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent as a formative experience in our encounter with worlds of politics and journalism.

Fear of Fascism

By Samantha Hill
Jacob Mikanowski profiles Timothy Snyder for The Chronicle Review. Snyder is a historian of the Holocaust and professor at Yale University. His new work, The Road to Unfreedom, chronicles the rise of authoritarianism today.

The Microbiome

By Roger Berkowitz
Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs report on one of the greatest threats to our way of life, the rise of bacteria and fungi that are impervious to medications. The culprit, as with so much in our modern health and environmental crises, is the overuse of antibiotics and antifungal medications  in farming.

Secrets and Sins

By Roger Berkowitz
The New York Times is running a series of articles on privacy called the Privacy Project.  James Martin has an excellent essay on the double way that privacy is addressed in the Bible.

Spotlight on The Campus Plurality Project

“Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.” —Hannah Arendt

Should Activists Use Violence to Create Social Change?

By Micah White
In a 1967, Hannah Arendt had a discussion with Noam Chomsky and other prominent antiwar movement intellectuals on “The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?” Their chat was recorded and published in an obscure volume on “Dissent, Power, and Confrontation.”

Courage to Be Student Essay: Livy Marie Donahue on Deogratias Niyizonkiza

By Livy Marie Donahue
Deogratias Niyizonkiza visited Bard College on March 4th, as the second speaker of the 2019
Courage to Be lecture series.

No Crisis, But a Danger

By Roger Berkowitz
The folks at PEN ask, is there a crisis of free speech on college campuses. And once again, they answer “no.”