With humble apologies to Wallace Stevens.
I.
Among twenty piles of Critical Thinking exams
The only moving thing
Was a blackbird that somehow got into my office. WTF. Continue reading
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
John Holt at Res Publica
My friend, colleague, and former high school English teacher, John Holt, has just started a blog called Res Publica. As you may have figured out, John sometimes comments here at PoT under the handle “jrholt1236.”
John was until recently an Associate Professor of English at Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Now, from what I gather, he mostly spends his time reading, sailing–and blogging. He resides with his wife in a small rural hamlet in New Jersey and on a small nameless island off the coast of Maine (no, I’m not making any of this up: there are rural hamlets in New Jersey, and I’ve been to Holt’s Isle).
So bookmark/follow his blog. Meanwhile, I’m still on (substantive) blogcation.
Felician Conference Due Date Extended
The due date for submissions to the Tenth Annual Felician Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs has been extended a week to March 8.
Sabahat Zakariya: “Muslimish of New York”
As I said, I’m on hiatus from active blogging, but that doesn’t stop me from doing passive blogging. In case you’re wondering, this is what a passive post looks like.
So here’s my cousin Sabahat Zakariya on SoundCloud, doing a piece for NYU Radio called “Muslimish of New York.” It’s an amusing-informative description of the situation of the younger generation of Muslim American apostates–rejecting of Islam, but wary of Islamophobia. I know the feeling.
By way of introduction: Sabahat is a Falak Sufi Scholar in the Department of Near East Studies at New York University, and in the master’s program in journalism there. She’s a single mom, speaks in a thick Aitchison College brogue, and makes the best chicken biryani in Park Slope. She’s (kinda) promised to do some blogging at PoT, but she’s busy, so who knows.
Gimme a Break
I’ve decided to take a bit of a hiatus from active blogging. I’m just finding it impossible to blog and keep up with my other commitments–teaching, running a pre-law program, running an ethics institute, co-chairing a committee on leadership and social justice, and trying to get a degree in psychology. I’ll probably be taking at least a month off, but may well take the rest of the spring term off.
Last Call: CFP, Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference
Last call for papers or abstracts (papers preferred) in ethics or political philosophy for the Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. Due date is March 1 March 8. The conference itself runs all day, Saturday, April 23, 2016 in the Education Commons Building of Felician University’s Rutherford campus: 227 Montross Ave., Rutherford, New Jersey, 07070. Plenary speaker is J.L.A. Garcia (Boston College), “Grounding the Metatheory of Morals.”
Please note the call for papers/abstracts for a special dedicated session on the ethics, politics, and economics of adjuncting.
Send papers in blind review format to felicianethicsconference@gmail.com. More information here.
Republican Islamophobia: A Response
This is a much belated response to Peter Saint-Andre and Michael Young on Republican Islamophobia, from my post of January 5. Given its length, I’ve decided to make a new post of my response rather than try to insert it into the combox.
Looking over the whole exchange, I can’t help thinking that the point I made in my original post has gotten lost in a thicket of meta-issues orthogonal to what I said in the original post. I don’t dispute that the issues that Peter and Michael have brought up are worth discussing, but I still think that they bypass what I actually said.
Contingency, Irony, and Brutality: Richard Rorty in Israel
As the years went by, and we both left Princeton, I am afraid the incipient intellectual and emotional gulf between us got wider, especially after what I saw as Dick’s turn toward ultra-nationalism with the publication of Constructing Our Country. Dick had always been and remained to the end of his life a “liberal” (in the American sense, i.e., a “Social Democrat”): a defender of civil liberties and of the extension of a full set of civic rights to all, a vocal supporter of the labor unions and of programs to improve the conditions of the poor, an enemy of racism, cruelty, arbitrary authority, and social exclusion.
Letter from a Chevalier to a Lady of No Quality
Dear Lady Who Was Sitting in the Middle of Row E at the Polish Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra’s All-Beethoven Concert, Enlow Recital Hall, Kean University, Hillside, New Jersey, February 6, 2016, between 7:30 and 9:30 pm:
I think it’s really cool that you brought your three young children to an orchestral performance, I really do. Audiences for classical music are starting to dwindle nowadays, and if classical music is to survive, it needs the support of the younger generation–like your three delightful little children.
But still, I would like to point out to you that
Reason Papers 37.2 is now out
The latest issue of Reason Papers, vol. 37, number 2 is now out; officially, it’s the Fall 2015 issue, but we only just managed to put it up on the website last night. This link will take you to a monster-size PDF to the whole issue (almost 250 pages). This link will take you to the journal’s Archive page, where you can access individual articles for this or any past issue (you have to scroll down a bit). Finally, this link will take you to three (time sensitive) Calls for Papers issued by the journal’s editors: one on “the philosophy of play” (March 1, 2016); one a fifteen-year retrospective on 9/11 (July 1, 2016); and one an Authors-Meet-Critics symposium on Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen’s forthcoming book The Perfectionist Turn: From Meta-Norms to Meta-Ethics (February 1, 2017).
