sara hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor »| sarahendren.com
Will I miss academic philosophy? Yes, of course. I will miss my peers and mentors, who are meticulous and exacting, and the culture of lively argument that they jointly create. I will miss reading groups, although I’m perhaps overly optimistic about my ability to convince “civilians” to read Kant with me out there in the wild. I will certainly miss teaching undergraduates, which has been one of the best parts of graduate school. Above all, I will miss the discipline’s commitment to re...| sarahendren.com
We’ll see if this is truly the turning point people seem to think it is. With some weariness, I ask, “What’s going to change exactly? America will become a violent country filled with guns and inflammatory rhetoric? The power of the state will be used without the restraint of the law or rights to attack its enemies?” We’re there already. The true disaster would be to use this to end or injure free political life in this country. I think I can say without being disingenuous that’s ...| sarahendren.com
The dystopian horror of a future where “defective” embryos are targeted for destruction should be obvious, though to many it is evidently not. Siddiqui retweeted someone saying he can’t understand the outrage over intentional embryo sorting, when the very process of IVF (as most commonly practiced) guarantees not all embryos once created can be implanted. If people are unbothered by the fact that embryos in general are discarded all the time, whence the squeamishness at the proposal to ...| sarahendren.com
I’ve been living with Alasdair MacIntyre frequently in my head for the last couple of years. This recent lecture explores some of what’s been on my mind. I’m still making sense of the way my mind changed in mid-life, and I find it reassuring that MacIntyre also had several big intellectual and religious conversions (and, also like me, no PhD!). I’ll be trying to write more about him in coming months and years. This remembrance is lovely:| sarahendren.com
I am thoroughly enjoying Birnam Wood:| sara hendren
When we gathered as a class in the wake of the A.I. assignment, hands flew up. One of the first came from Diego, a tall, curly-haired student — and, from what I’d made out in the course of the semester, socially lively on campus. “I guess I just felt more and more hopeless,” he said. “I cannot figure out what I am supposed to do with my life if these things can do anything I can do faster and with way more detail and knowledge.” He said he felt crushed.| sarahendren.com
This week I had architecture students reading about rural and remote spaces. Among other things, they looked at the terrific work of Rural Studio, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and essays by Wendell Berry. I also included this interview with Berry, which cites an abbreviated version of his “agrarian values.” I asked students to identify the ideas that are not explicitly environmental, in the familiar green-rhetoric sense, and to speculate about why they might be part o...| sara hendren
Joseph Davis:| sarahendren.com
Brady Smith, on tagging along with his father to the meetings of his parish’s men’s group in the 90s:| sara hendren
What I said in the comments section of Freddie’s new post:| sara hendren
Alan Jacobs:| sara hendren
We’ve talked about formation, readiness, and prescriptive disciplines. Today I want to talk about spaces for learning.| sarahendren.com
Part 1 and Part 2 in this series.| sarahendren.com
So we’ve looked at formation and freedom in the college decision process. I want to examine next the framework of readiness in higher education to get at formation in another way — what should four years make a student ready for? I’ve written about this subject before, but today I want to restate the strengths and add some of the weaknesses of this frame.| sarahendren.com
This is likely to be the first in a series of meditations on the college decision-making process. My two younger kids are embarking on the process now, so I’m thinking about the subject personally; my job as a professor means I’m thinking about it in my workplace, too. And I hardly need to say that the big questions are in the zeitgeist after this academic year: What kinds of four-year experiences are worth paying for? What’s available in that developmental window that can be nurtured a...| sarahendren.com