Archives: Newsletter Post

Emily St. John Mandel’s new dystopian novel, Exit Party, takes place in the near future and considers two outcomes of a national crisis. In one version, the United States has devolved through civil war into several independent states and regions run by militias. In the other, the nation has become an authoritarian surveillance state. By […]

For years, Erhardt Graeff, Associate Professor of Social and Computer Science at Olin College of Engineering, taught about democracy and technology. His students studied social movements, digital media, civic technology, and the ways people organize to shape public life. They examined national elections, international politics, and the role technology plays in democratic participation. Graeff’s own […]

This month we are launching the fall 2026 issue of our magazine, Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing. Read some reflections on the issue from Suzanne Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the Institute for Social Concerns. Read more.

In his article about joy and engineering, Cameron Kim, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Biomedical Engineering and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University, reminds us that curiosity and joy are integral elements to learning. Read more.

This spring, Tana French published her tenth novel, The Keeper.  I read my first Tana French novel almost 20 years ago. It was her debut, In the Woods, that would become part of a series of six murder mysteries—the Dublin murder squad. I picked it up off a table at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill […]

When Anna McEwan arrived as dean of the Orlean Beeson School of Education at Samford University in January 2020, she inherited a vision statement promising to graduate students who were not only professionally competent but also people of excellent character. Her first question to faculty cut straight to the gap between aspiration and practice: “I […]

Charlotte McConaghy is a writer of rare atmospheric power, able to render landscape and grief as a single continuous thing, so that you cannot quite say where the weather ends and the mourning begins. The novel belongs, for me, to a growing body of work wrestling with what it means to love a world that […]

Each semester at Radford University, students from courses across the university gather in the Artis Center for a conference-style showcase unlike most academic events. They come not to receive grades or hear lectures, but to present original solutions to some of the world’s hardest problems: climate change, food insecurity, homelessness, democratic erosion. Students, community partners, […]

In his foundational article, Robert A. Emmons, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of California, Davis, provides a road map to understanding the psychology of joy. He writes, “joy offers a fuller and richer portrait of a person’s capacity to live a life of purpose, meaning, and value, or an experience of “elation of right relation” […]

I received Steve Garber’s Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate (2026) as a birthday present this month and promptly began to devour it. Garber is a beautiful, lyrical writer able to interweave a wide range of personal, artistic and scholarly insights. Garber has the distinctive talent of making the reader feel […]