ethics

Veronica Toth explores utilitarianism through intellectual history and lived experience.

Ruthanne SooHee Crapo encourages those committed to environmental justice to reflect on the place of waste in modern life.

Taylor Ross considers how the recent unmasking of Elena Ferrante reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of language and literature.

The magnet read, “I’m making cancer my Bitch.” It was one of the small trinkets in the cancer-survivor corner of the hospital gift shop: a cartoon sketch of a white, winking woman with bouffant hair and a plastered smile under 1950s twinkle typography. Beside bagged candy teddy bears, you could buy the magnet in the color scheme of […]

Social change does not happen in a vacuum. Nor is social change the effect of crises, of those extreme moments in which the status quo is radically disrupted by, for example, mass protests (or riots) in response to state violence against civilians, flagrant judicial malfeasance, or governmental monetary misappropriation. Although crises may historically mark a […]

One’s neighbor is often not even the people next door but the people of one’s home, household, workplace and religious community. One’s neighbor is the person of the opposite gender. —Mercy Oduyoye, Beads and Strands   Flawless Execution Beyoncé Knowles has done myself, and many like me, a huge favor. Through the popularity of her […]

Through the lens of James Baldwin’s black intellectual imagination, Quentin Tarantino’s slave revenge fantasy, Django Unchained, becomes a terrifying allegory of white progressive identity in America today.

Reflections on why we ride.

[Editor’s note: the following is a guest post written by Scott Schomburg, who is an M.Div ’13 candidate at Duke Divinity School, with research interests in political theology and contemporary humanitarianism. A previous version of this was posted here] A new generation of humanitarians is coming-of-age in North America, turned toward an image of Africa in […]