What is Called Thinking in the Anthropocene?
Thinking is communal and our community is collapsing.
Lisbon
This is a piece about failures.
My failures, mostly, as a thinker and a scholar, but also the failure of my field and the failure of all of us to think what will come in the next ten, twenty, thirty, hundred years.
Before I wrote this piece about failure, I had been failing to write—or failing to finish writing, which amounts to very nearly the same thing—for the better part of a year. I had spent the previous three years as a postdoc at a university that reminded me of nothing so much as the princess in that old fairytale who drops rubies and roses from her mouth whenever she speaks. Everything was nice. The students were attentive, the grounds were immaculate, my colleagues held warm, chatty happy hours, and my research budget let me tip lavishly every time I took a cab (a cab!) at conferences. It was so nice that I was always naively surprised when it rained. In my memory, it was perpetually an early autumn afternoon, with just the right angle of sunlight to fill me with cheerful thoughts of interesting work well begun—a sanitized vanitas painting that was all fruits and lutes, and no skulls. But my field was collapsing, a little faster than other fields, and at the end of my three years I still didn’t have a permanent job. Just a book, written as an intervention into a field I no longer believed in and which certainly didn’t believe in me. Without a place in the profession I had trained in, all of those happy hours turned out to be worth less than I could have imagined, and the people I had spent three years alongside almost without exception vanished from my life. I was someone until I wasn’t.
I bring all of this up, not as preface to yet another quit lit piece but because it is important for understanding what happened to me next: I lost faith in thinking.
Oh, I had plenty of things I wanted to think about. I had this project I was starting about the refusal to forgive, not as a sign of pathological resentment but as an ethical stance in its own right. I had a short piece I wanted to expand, which argued that my field’s obsession with Christianity’s persistence in secularism was at once a way of imagining how we would be viewed by future generations looking back on our world after the devastation of climate change and a fantasy of Western culture as something that could never die. Most of all, I had the promise held out by the end of my book, where I argued that all of the forms of critique that had driven academic work had lost their luster because the persuasiveness of critique was the product of a historical moment that was already passing as I wrote. I hadn’t proposed a new paradigm. In fact, I had rejected the hope of a new Derrida or a new Foucault as just another iteration of Foucault’s theory of epistemic breaks. We should, I argued, abandon the fantasy of a savior thinker and fix our gaze on the questions that matter to us. And why not? I was supposed to have a career in front of me to think about those questions with colleagues across the country.
It had all seemed very important when I was dreaming up new projects over lunches with colleagues. But what were these projects worth outside of the academy? They were mostly different ways to think about the problems with academic thinking. That had been fine—on point, even—when I had imagined a long academic career stretching before me but was I really going to keep writing these sorts of articles after my intellectual community had vanished around me? Did I value these conversations enough to keep showing up in journals and at conferences as “an independent scholar,” hoping the five people left in my field who still had jobs would care? Ought I even continue contributing to academic conversations? I had always sworn that I would not adjunct for a living; the academy could either pay me a living wage or I would leave for something, anything, else. Writing seemed like more of the same. It was labor and I didn’t much feel like contributing any more of it for free to an industry that was cutting full-time jobs for faculty while saddling students with debt.
And so I made progress on none of these projects—not forgiveness, not climate change, not critique. I hadn’t even managed the shorter items on my task list, like reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction. Her luminous dying frogs reproached me.
Instead, every afternoon at lunchtime I made the walk from my office to my apartment, where I would wrap my arms around the enormous barrel chest of my short, ginger pit bull, rest my cheek against her white neck, and tell her that I loved her. She filled me with infinite tenderness, this silly little dog who liked to sidle up to strangers and drop down on one shoulder with her rear in the air—this sweet, kind, vulnerable creature who had come so close to dying amid the wails of a concrete kill shelter because people were afraid of her strength. I sometimes suspected strangers thought she was ugly, with her chiseled haunches, hollow cheekbones, and Hapsburg underbite, but loved her all the more fiercely for it. Scratching her chin and looking into her limpid eyes, I told her she was beautiful and I would always protect her. She gave me mute, uncomprehending kisses in reply, and we both were happy.
That autumn we went on long, rambling walks together through the Village. Sometimes I silently raged against everything that had happened in recent months. Mostly I spent my time imagining a heaven I didn’t believe in where I would finally tell my dog in words she could understand how much I loved her and how very sorry I was for all the ways that I had failed her.
***
Sometimes it happened on these walks that we would meet a woman who sold water bottles from a cooler with the cheerful crescendo of an auctioneer. “One dollar, one dollar, one dollar!” I had seen her a few times before we officially met, but absently filed her away as someone who catered to tourists caught off guard by the brutal summer heat. We were both regulars in the park, like the men who played chess for money, or the pair who sang bluegrass with deep burred voices, but according to the silent logic of public spaces our orbits never intersected. One day, though, her eyes focused on Faraday trotting at my side and, without warning, she glowed. I had only experienced something like it once before, when I was twenty and staying in a hostel in Amsterdam. The janitor, a tall, loping man of fifty locked eyes on me and smiled—not hesitantly, as if he thought I might be an acquaintance he was surprised to see, no, but joyously, as if I were his dearest friend from childhood, unexpectedly turned up decades after he had given up all hope of meeting again in this life. That man had spent the next three hours telling me the story of his time in the Black Panthers and the lonely years when he bought a microwave for the novelty of smelling popcorn; this woman dropped to her knees and opened her arms with a ringing cry of, “Hi, baby!” Faraday, who loves nothing better than to launch herself into a stranger’s arms, began skittering her claws and pulling against her leash, looking for all the world like a real life Scooby Doo winding up to bolt across pavement that pinned her obstinately in place.
Her name was Cherelle. It would be going too far to say we became friends, even after she started showing me pictures of her cats and offering me free water for Faraday on those days when our walks barely lasted three blocks because the sidewalk scorched her paws. Rather, for me she became a kind of benevolent embodiment of the city. I knew nothing about her life and I doubt for her part that she remembered my name. But we had singled each other out, among all of the street hawkers and dog walkers, and met as two women sharing a conspiratorial chat about how this obviously was the best dog and this weather really was too damn hot, even for someone who sold water for a living.
Minimal as it was, our relationship grew to have an outsized significance to me in those months. I was burnt out, raw, and lonely, and it helped to have something in my life that was good in an uncomplicated, untaxing way. Two people meet. A puppy capers between them. They smile at her antics and part, each feeling seen. Nothing much has happened, but what has happened wasn’t cruel or burdened with expectations. It was better that we smiled and chatted than not. And how many things could anyone really say that about with certainty?
Only gradually did I realize she had also made a type of thinking impossible for me.
For months I had been trying to write a piece on climate change. I knew how I wanted it to start. Three ships bob on the ocean a hundred miles outside of Lisbon, Portugal. It’s early, maybe half past nine, on All Saint’s Day, 1755. The men are going about their normal morning routine, ropes or mops clutched in their hands, when suddenly they are falling, falling toward a deck that has jumped eighteen inches beneath them. On another ship, all of the cabin windows shatter at once, with the sound of an explosion. On the third, their cannons jump from the force of the shock. The men get up and peer after the enormous wave speeding toward Lisbon, troubled.
In Lisbon, it is one of the busiest days of the year. The rural poor have flooded into the city to celebrate morning mass in the great cathedrals. Those who live in the city have banked their hearths, leaving breakfast to warm over the coals while they are out. An English vicar is out for his morning walk, when he is heaved forward, flailing for anything he can grasp for support. And the city below him crumples.
They have no words for what has just happened. We know now that it was an earthquake, larger than the San Francisco earthquake of 1904, larger than the Haitian earthquake of 2010. But for the people who filed into church that morning, it must have seemed as if the landscape had spontaneously invented a whole new way to die—the way we might feel if oxygen suddenly vanished in San Francisco. So they run for the shore, begging the ships in the harbor to save them from the earth that has revolted against them.
As they reached the shore, an enormous wave—not just a tsunami but a tele-tsunami—came crashing down, washing away those who had escaped to the shore. Numbers are imprecise but scholars estimate that between 900 and 3,000 people were swept away as they awaited help on the shore.
After the flood came the fire, the most devastating in human costs of all the catastrophes. It was started by candles and coals from the hearth, knocked into wooden homes from the earthquake. The temperature grew so high as the fires merged that they began sucking the oxygen into a vacuum. Many of those trapped under the rubble suffocated or burned alive. Some skulls appear to have exploded from the heat. Opportunistic arsonists, looking for a chance to loot in the distraction, made everything all the worse.
My interest, the centerpiece of the climate change piece I had been imagining, was about what happened next.
The Lisbon Earthquake
Lisbon horrified Enlightenment Europe. Horrified it because the devastation was so total; horrified it because it was a reminder of all the things the new advances in science could not protect Europe from; horrified it because it was so senseless. Witnesses couldn’t even take solace in the idea that Lisbon had been singled out for divine retribution because of its especial sinfulness, as a kind of new Sodom. First, because Portugal wasn’t particularly sinful, not really. By some estimates, close to 10% of the population belonged to some religious order at the time, whether a convent, monastery, or priesthood. The people, too, were devout Catholics; the death tolls proved it. Some of the worst casualty rates occurred among those attending mass in the great cathedrals at the moment the earthquake struck. Second, because Portugal had been overtaken by a de facto dictator in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the Marquês de Pombal, who was very interested in rebuilding the city and not at all interested in humoring the cries to prostrate themselves before God. In fact, he was so hostile to traditional theological breast beating that he had an elderly Jesuit priest, Father Gabriel Malagrida, arrested, strangled and burnt at the stake for urging the Portuguese to repent to God. It made no difference to the Marquês that much of the surrounding population considered Malagrida very like a saint. Theology had to give way to state planning.
By far the most famous response to the earthquake was Voltaire’s. Shaken, the great skeptic wrote a poem commemorating the event. “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, Or an Examination of the Axiom ‘All is Well’” has none of the caustic wit and flippancy expected from the man who was reputed to have said on his deathbed, when asked by a priest to renounce Satan, “Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies.” Rather, it is earnest, outraged, troubled. Railing against a pious imagined interlocutor, the narrator asks,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
The poem traveled.
Specifically, it traveled to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who responded to Voltaire with a letter that has become famous in certain circles. After reproaching Voltaire for snatching away any comfort he might find in the tragedy, Rousseau goes on to argue that even seemingly natural evils, like earthquakes, are typically our own fault. “Without leaving your Lisbon subject,” he begins:
Concede, for example, that it was hardly nature who assembled there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock, and would have been seen two days later, twenty leagues away and as happy as if nothing had happened. But we have to stay and expose ourselves to further tremors, many obstinately insisted, because what we would have to leave behind is worth more than what we could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster for wanting to take—one his clothing, another his papers, a third his money? They know so well that a person has become the least part of himself, and that he is hardly worth saving if all the rest is lost.
Rousseau wrote this frenzied letter five years after his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences won the Academy of Dijon’s essay prize by arguing that advances in science and culture had corrupted, not purified human morals, and one year after his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality attributed the fall of human nature to a diseased need for the esteem of others, exacerbated by the invention of property. So it is a harsh assessment of the ways luxury and unnatural social relations can distort human priorities, but not the uncomplicated castigation of victims that it seems.
Still, Rousseau has been roundly condemned in the history of philosophy for a response that is read as at once dismissive and cruel. His impulse to view the earthquake as morally neutral is familiar enough but the pivot to blaming victims for their own deaths, however equivocal and complicated that move may be, carries the whiff of self-protective terror. It is a denial of contingency, an assertion that bad fortune could have been prevented if the victim had only known better or lived better or been more careful. It’s a comforting move and it is even a consistent move, given Rousseau’s broader romanticization of pastoral life, but it is a morally indefensible move.
Or so it seemed.
The Lisbon Earthquake
One of the peculiar ironies of the last decade is that Rousseau’s argument has seen a resurgence in conversations about climate change. Few people overtly shame victims of natural disasters for their shallow attachment to material goods, true, but the idea that a disaster is only a disaster because of human action is surprisingly widely accepted. It takes different forms. Some argue that disasters exacerbate income inequality, hurting those who were already economically vulnerable more than their more prosperous neighbors. Others point to Haiti’s collapse in the wake of its 2010 earthquake as an example of a social disaster, made worse by extreme poverty, mass crowding in slums and poor building materials, all due to centuries of slavery, economic blockades, and the reparations the Haitians were forced to pay to the French for loss of property (in which the French included their lost slaves). The tsunami of 2004 was likewise a human disaster, made worse by the decisions to decimate mangrove forests and coral reefs, both of which would have buffered the impact of the storm. Even Obama acknowledged that Katrina was the type of disaster it was because those living in the lowest-lying, most vulnerable areas were often the poorest, with the least resources to leave the city.
And on, and on. Though no one referenced the precedent, Rousseau has been vindicated. The argument that once seemed so self-evidently cruel and immoral before—disasters are only disasters because we insist on living in the wrong places, in the wrong ways—is now skimmed over as a truism by academics on the evening news. The types of moral failings are different, as are the ways each society has gone awry, but the intuition is the same. Natural disasters are human disasters, created by human moral failings.
Rousseau’s response to Lisbon makes an interesting parallel to the present. His debate with Voltaire raises questions about the role of theology in our current understanding of disaster, our dependence on old explanations for an increasingly new problem, the “correct” vision of society we have deviated from, and our understanding of human action that makes us assume “man-made disaster” is the same as “preventable.” All fascinating, but what of it? What was the actual value of knowing our talking points about disaster had a history stretching back to the eighteenth century? What can historicizing do or explain about a moment unprecedented in our history? What should I make of my desire to historicize a moment that threatens to destroy history?
Mostly, though, I stumbled when trying to write this piece in those early autumn months because I couldn’t imagine what the value of such a project was to Cherelle. Cherelle, with a washcloth draped over her buzzed blonde head and water dripping on to her lime green tank top, trying to scrape together a living selling disposable plastic water bottles she bought in bulk at Costco to tourists scurrying to the closest air conditioned building. It would be her apartment that flooded in the East Village, her refrigerator that lost power, the same refrigerator I imagined her painstakingly piling water bottles into the night before she packed them into her cooler and hauled them to the park. How would any of my thoughts—true or untrue—help her when that moment came? What will she care about my theories of Rousseau and Lisbon when the water comes?
***
A few months into our rambling walks, I had to give a talk at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). I had been invited to speak at a panel celebrating the end of University of Chicago’s Postmodernism and Religion series. I had very little to say about postmodernism as a category. It had once meant a great deal to me, back when I was twenty and first entering the field. Now, it seemed one more mostly dead debate, Frankenstein’s monster twitching feebly in the coffin while the funeral attendees politely pretended not to notice. Still, the series had been started by one of my graduate school advisers, a complicated, controversial man who nonetheless had shown me great kindness in his own gruff way. I was inclined to be grateful to loyalty where I found it and cautiously pleased by the opportunity to sum up what I thought was being lost with my field. I had always thought of leaving the academy as the inverse of the old childhood trick of imagining your own funeral with your parents weeping and wailing over your tasteful corpse in regret for how cruel they had been. It was a funeral, no doubt, but one where no one attended. What, after all, was one more young scholar giving up the dream of the tenure track? This talk was, if nothing else, a way to ambush a room full of scholars with my wake. In my exit, too, I was luckier than most driven out of the academy.
And what a room it was! There were at least a hundred people there, possible even two. The talk itself made something of a stir, not from the content so much as a moment in the Q&A. A man had stood up and asked why it was, when he was a young scholar, that philosophy of religion had been cool but now, twenty years later, it was embarrassing to tell people what he worked on. (I salute you, sir, whoever you were.) With my old roommate and co-panelist elbowing me in the ribs, I stood up and blurted out that the field had died because it hated women and kept giving all its jobs to white men writing books about Hegel. It was true—I could only name three women and two people of color in thirteen years who had gotten tenure track jobs in philosophy of religion (though some had made softer landings in ethics or African-American religions, which most programs in philosophy of religion treated as a separate field altogether)—but in the hubbub that followed, my deeper point was lost.
Philosophy of religion—or religion and postmodernism, or continental philosophy of religion, or Western religious thought, or whatever you want to call it—was a practice of failing. It was a lot of other things as well, of course. Most importantly, it was one of the last places to get a generalist’s education, however imperfectly. I know of no other field where you are required to read Augustine, Derrida, and the whole philosophical-theological canon in between as part of your candidacy exams. It was a way of connecting theory to the history of philosophy, seeing as philosophy departments are often far too squeamish to spend their time on affect theory or new materialism or any of the insights generated by anthropology. It was a way of clawing back the definition of philosophy from philosophy departments, of insisting that the focus on proofs and norms and the internal consistency of arguments leaves out the genuine stylistic experimentation many philosophers have long engaged in. Trying to excise the uncomfortable bits, the pseudo-scientific bits, the experimental literary bits, the historically specific bits so that you are left with a tightly controlled, highly rational canon of figures—this turns the whole philosophical project into an act of narcissism.
The Earthquake of 1755, painted from 1756 to 1792 by João Glama Ströberle (1708-1792). Currently in the National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, Portugal.
But mostly, for me, it was a space for thinking about failure and thinking as failure. My field provided an opportunity to read the whole, long complicated history of philosophy without having to commit to the idea that these particular theories are true in any strong sense of the word, as a theologian might, but merely to the idea that they are interesting and beautiful, or wrong in telling ways, or psychologically astute while being hopelessly grandiose, or intellectually shattering but morally blind. It looked—or, at any rate, I looked—for the blind spots, failures, unanswered questions and unrecognized contradictions, not to reproach or correct a thinker but because those were the places where it became obvious that the grandest systems were just the product of a human imagination muddling through. And why not? Wouldn’t it be quite strange if one man in eighteenth-century Königsberg managed to figure out the nature of morality for all time by thinking very hard about it in his living room? No, I took failure to be inevitable, which was just as well. I would have found the field’s shortcomings sooner or later, even if I hadn’t gone in looking for them. As a field, philosophy of religion has a very classical white and male canon. It is hard to be too sentimental about a field of study that has argued you lack the capacity to reason for most of its history.
Still, in my own strange way, I loved even the fustiest in the moments of their failure, these old dead men who stacked their thoughts like bricks into rickety buildings that were somehow always missing a door or a window or a set of stairs. I loved to read them and to teach them as flawed people thinking very hard about impossible questions, with hopeless aspirations for how total, how correct their system could be. Artists creating sand mandalas, who imagined they were building the Newtonian laws of the mind—the pathos of it still sometimes has the power to floor me. No matter how bitter or spiteful or arrogant bigoted they were in life, I always imagined them standing in a row of powdered wigs, each smiling dumbly, bashfully before their collapsed pile of bricks, shrugging as if to say wordlessly, And there it is…
That the job market tended not to reward such an approach did not make it wrong.
Who will read us with such sympathy when we are gone?
***
“We are articled to error,” as W.H. Auden once remarked, perhaps now more so than ever. All of these failures are not mine alone, however particular the details. We are living through two catastrophes of thought, neither of which needed to be. The first is the sheer devastation of climate change. What is there actually to be said about the fact that one million species face extinction because of our actions? Truly, what can grasp the scope and particularity of this devastation? Are we to analyze the ways power distributes unevenly, burdening the poorest nations with the greatest suffering, or carefully pluck out the legacy of colonialism? A worthy project, but one that only adds more evidence to a grievance we have been steadfastly refusing to hear for centuries. Are we to call for a new politics? I suppose, but I doubt most of those calling for a new politics were particularly happy with the way politics were tending prior to their interest in climate change. What about preach the end of capitalism? Ditto, ditto, ditto.
These are our old projects from the last fifty years. They are not bad ways of thinking and their points are not necessarily wrong but they are ways of managing the existential threat of climate change (a threat not limited to our species, never forget) by carving it up into the same types of arguments scholars have been making my entire life, this time with a side of planetary catastrophe. These arguments make climate change familiar. It is not. The only category I have found to be of any use in thinking through the world at two degrees, three degrees, four degrees, is the sublime, the sense of greatness beyond all measure that instills fear and awe. The mind folds before the immensity of the tragedy and all there is left to do is helplessly repeat Rilke’s too-often quoted indiction: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” “You must change your life”—true but perhaps but not much help for thought.
At the same time that we are thinking and failing to think about our new world with old categories the “we” that thinks is collapsing—at least within the academy. It is petty to bring up my own experience again, of course. I only do so because I think it was not unique. Was I depressed? Certainly. Giving up on career aspirations you devoted the last decade of your life to is depressing. But I was also facing a reality I hadn’t appreciated before. Thinking is communal and our community is collapsing. Perhaps it might be possible to be a painter or a poet working alone in a garret, an Emily Dickinson content to produce art for its own sake (though I am not even convinced of that), but a thinker has to think in common with a broader conversation. Thoughts are her canvas, her paint. There is no intellectual work that does not take place as part of a dialogue with the living or dead. By leaving the academy, I had given up my natural community and it was not clear where I would find my new one.
This was not just a question of who I would talk to. It was a question of what I would talk about. There are very few intellectual problems that are compelling regardless of their context. Anselm needed his brotherhood of monks to make sense of his ontological proofs. Kant needed the Pantheism Controversy to transform his dense work on epistemology into a classic. I needed to be a member of the AAR for my thoughts on the philosophy of history underlying political theology to matter.
Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.
It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”
But I am skeptical of that line. I think the answer is likely simpler: it is hard to think about precarity in moments of precarity. Climate change is arguably the biggest source of global precarity, or soon will be, but the expectations put on academics, tenured and untenured, and writers, established or unestablished, are another. There simply is no room to start a story with no end or a monograph that might not be accepted when on the tenure clock. The financial realities prevent it. The perverse outcome of this increasing precarity in all aspects of life is that we no longer write the types of books we teach. Who could write an Origins of Totalitarianism or Genealogy of Morals today? Not an academic looking for tenure, at any rate. That, more than anything, is what depresses me—that the last moments of an old world will be accompanied by books pared down to a modest, acceptable form by the sputtering of the tenure machine.
My walks with Faraday are shorter these days. She hurt herself jumping around and playing over the winter, so she needed knee surgery. I spent much of the summer taking slow, hobbling walks with her while I struggled to help support her back legs with a sling. Her weight is just a little too much for me but I am happy to bear it. She needs a second surgery on the other knee in a few weeks.
“Just a pit bull weakness,” the vet said with a shrug when I asked. “It would have happened sooner or later.”
The sling has not stopped her from running up to friendly strangers and demanding attention, but it has been months since we have seen Cherelle. This, too, is a type of loss. For my part, I am finishing this essay while applying for 9-5’s outside of academia. I am grateful to have been given the chance to write it but worried that there is so much I haven’t been able to think and say—so much that I might not find the time or energy to say, given the realities of a new job. Nevertheless:
This is my pile of bricks.
And there it is…
***
Liane Carlson is the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 2015. From 2015-2018 worked as the Stewart Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Her book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience, is now available from Columbia University Press. She is currently working on a new book on the refusal to forgive.
***
Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.