Newman’s model of liberal arts study provides an ideal roadmap for how to create a program that would encourage focused, meaningful interdisciplinary learning.

Gina Elia on the application of Newman’s ideals

To showcase the ongoing relevance of a liberal arts education to students, programs should emphasize the roles of generalists, as opposed to specialists, in a society’s infrastructure.

Gina Elia on the ongoing urgency of John Henry Newman

The posters on my wall are meant to evoke a vintage style, but they are really artistic echoes of centuries of attempts to catalog the world, from book lists to agricultural pictures to Sears’s grandiosity.

Carl Friesenhahn on trade catalogs as maps of modernity

Dorothea Veit-Schlegel shared some commitments with male Romantics, but she critiqued many of their central ideas, especially in relation to gender, education, and personal development.

Anna Ezekiel recovers an essential Romantic thinker and writer

The notion that the people suffering from mass incarceration could testify truthfully about the system’s horrors was, and still often is, contentious. . . . Even more controversial: the idea that incarcerated people can critically analyze their position.

Luke Fidler on complaint and justice in prison

We cannot know the end of America, though we know from the first unfurling of Ishmael’s prophecy that the voyage of the Pequod is doomed.

Daniel Fitzpatrick follows in the wake of the doomed Pequod

For these readers of the Bible, the prophets were no longer predicters of the future—messianic or otherwise—but interpreters of God in past and present.

Paul Michael Kurtz on the German theorist of Jewish history