Grant Li

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on the atlas — 26

highlights — 16

This is our shiny new building that is the jewel of our expanding campus,’ and are making no visible investments in the humanities, that creates a narrative.” He believed that universities were all too happy to accept plummeting humanities enrollments, because the story of decline created its own vortex—one that drew away duties that the university, in its present pursuit of growth and revenue, might prefer not to deal with.
The End of the English Major | The New Yorker
“It isn’t just people trying to learn something to get a job,” she explained.
The End of the English Major | The New Yorker
Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long pursuit of understanding.
The End of the English Major | The New Yorker
Supply chains are already adapting by developing alternative sourcing that is not subject to Putin’s whims.
How the Russian economy self-immolated in the year since Putin invaded Ukraine | Fortune
it was too bad the boy had given up school. Yes, perhaps it was too bad, Father Pyotr agreed, since music links the school to eternity, after all. “Is music eternity?” Gleb asked. Father Pyotr shook his head. “Music is not eternity. But it reminds us of eternity – profound music does.” “What is eternity?” Gleb asked. “It is the absence of time,” Mefody conjectured, “which means the absence of death.” “Ultimately it is God,” Father Pyotr said. “The One you are seeking.”
In Search of Eternity by Eugene Vodolazkin
True friendship offers deep satisfactions, but it also imposes vulnerabilities and obligations, and to pretend it doesn’t is to devalue friendship.
Opinion | How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair? - The New York Times
When one hears of the unsuitability or ethnocentrism of liberal norms, what are the human rights that someone in a “civilization state” can do without?
Shashi Tharoor: Civilization States Are Profoundly Illiberal
We are, he pointed out, the only image of God that we have. To live as an image of God is to live so that those who come to know us are reminded of God.
Suffering with God: The Prophetic Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel by Susannah Heschel
Today, in academe, one looks around with dismay at what a century of professionalization has wrought—the mastery, yes, but also the bureaucratic pettiness, the clumsily concealed resentment, the quickness to take offense, and the piety, oh, the piety! The contemporary literary scholar, Guillory tells us, is marked by an inflated sense of the urgency and importance of his work. This professional narcissism is the flip side of an insecurity about his work’s social value, an anxiety that scholarly work, no matter how thoughtful, stylish, or genuinely interesting, has no discernible effect on the …
Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? | The New Yorker
A sense of place and a sense of heritage are incredible gifts that last a lifetime and beyond. It is important to know about the men and women who platted our streets and walked them before us, who built our neighborhoods and businesses, who taught in our schools and served in our governments, who shaped the institutions that make us proud to live where we do. Young people need heroes, but in an age of celebrities, we especially need local heroes. And we need to know the stories of the places, symbols, icons, and festivals that can make life in a local community interesting and inspiring.
Communities of Memory - Front Porch Republic
If the persistent loneliness of the world reminds us of the sin under which the world groans, then the loneliness of the saints is transfigured from a sign of spiritual starvation to a holy hunger. Loneliness is the pedagogue who helps us attend to the pain of others, driving us to listen more attentively to God’s voice. It is a mark of being human that reminds us of our need for God’s grace and companionship. To feel lonely within the church is not a sign of the church’s deficiency but a strange gift: loneliness tells us that the community exists not for itself but for God, not to solve the p…
The Solitude of the Saints - Comment Magazine
The very love that made community worth doing was also that which brought, for Day, deep agony with no abatement of the long loneliness—a phrase she used to describe the very act of living. “We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other,” she writes, but what she means here is precisely that the love we find in community is one that drags us through fire, not around it. The long loneliness was not banished by Christian community, for as she took up the life of the disciple, she learned that Christian community made it bearable. In the Christian community, on…
The Solitude of the Saints - Comment Magazine
the “struggling and questioning” of agnostics was an admirable posture, a radical openness that ought to motivate believers to “to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible.”
Opinion | Pope Benedict Was No Conservative. - The New York Times
“In our effort to get on the gravy train, we left a lot behind on the platform,” Javed Akhtar, a prominent poet and lyricist, said at the festival. “And among those things we forgot on the platform was literature, language, poetry and other arts.”
India’s Urdu Poetry Festival Draws Stadium Crowds - The New York Times
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was the painter of small-town America. This we know. That his small town happened to be New York City, his home for nearly sixty years, we may not know.
Rear window | The New Criterion
what is literature and music other than acts of love that we share with others? And in loving and creating, we make life a little easier for one another.
How to Bear Witness - The Millions