Lately, I have been reflecting a lot on the role of humanities in the current age of AI and Large Language Learning Models (LLMs). I know that some of my students probably find it convenient to use the semantic search functions to craft their essays, journal entries, and even larger research papers, but how do we convince them to rather do the hard work of crafting a thesis and then working over several drafts?
So, as teachers and humanists, what can we do to still encourage the traditional methods of learning and producing scholarly work? That is the question that we humanists need to think about.

Please share your thoughts.

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Simply stated, r/humanities is a space for discussing the things we humans create to understand ourselves and the world: history, philosophy, literature, religion, art, language, culture, politics, media, mythology, and everything in between.

While humanities comprise individual, stand-alone disciplines, it is in the very nature of humanities and humanistic pursuits to be cross-disciplinary

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A few years ago, some of my senior colleagues at Kent State University decided to start a pedagogy discussion group. Almost all of us in the group were heavily invested in social justice pedagogy and generally believed that a well-informed humanistic education can be instrumental in enabling more compassionate and caring human subjectivities.

We chose John Tagg’s The Learning Paradigm College as our first book for discussion. It has been years since I read the book, but some of it’s important suggestions and claims have stayed with me and have often informed my pedagogical practices.

Teaching Vs Learning Paradigm

Tagg distinguishes between two dominant paradigms: Teaching and Learning. For him, I would say in the same tradition as Freire, the teaching paradigm involves the coverage model, in which the teacher imparts knowledge to a passive body of students and emphasis is on covering the syllabus. The students are required to master the knowledge so imparted and are supposed to reproduce it in exams or tests. While this method is convenient for teachers, they only have to cover the syllabus, it trains the students only in learning under direction and does not encourage independent or critical thinking. According to Tagg, most US colleges and the K-12 system are teaching heavy and are organized under the teaching paradigm model.

The Learning Paradigm takes the students as active learners in class and assumes that learning is a continuous process. In this Paradigm the teacher encourages critical thinking and students, instead of just learning the subject matter, also learn how to learn. This method of teaching is more likely to produce students who understand things better and are capable of learning on their own as life-time learners.

Types of Learners

Another thing I recall from the book, and it has been useful in my own teaching, is the way Tagg discusses different types of student learners. Of course, Tagg uses empirical research by other scholars in his discussion of learning, but his point is that if we knew what kind of students we are dealing with, we can make their learning even better.

There are generally two kinds of students in any given classroom: Those who believe learning to be a a process and whose identities are in flux and those who subscribe to an entity theory of identity. The latter consider themselves as fully formed human subjects. These two views of self have a huge impact on student responses to instruction.

A student who believes that his or her identity is constantly in flux would take critical comments on his or her work as something positive, for it shows them that you have shown interest in their work and that your comments can help them improve it. In other words, such students welcome constructive criticism and since their idea of self is based in constant improvement, they apply the same rule to their work. Such students will always thank you for your suggestions and are never reluctant to revise their work.

Students who inhabit the entity theory of self do not accept criticism easily. It is because they deem themselves to be fully realized entities and see their work as an extension of themselves. Any criticism of their work, thus, comes across as a criticism of their selves.

Now, knowing what kind of identity beliefs a student holds can be crucial to our teaching and their learning, for our approach to working with them will be completely different in both cases.

Concluding Thoughts

In a Learning Paradigm college the teachers and professors would emphasize learning and the teachers would, ideally, know their students to tailor their pedagogy to the students particular needs.

Most importantly, in a Learning Paradigm the students will be seen as active participants in their own education and would know that learning is a continuous process and not necessarily defined by semester or course timelines.

I have previously discussed some of my teaching practices. Most of those practices are informed by my reading of John Tagg and, of course, Freire. For anyone interested in learning a little more about informed critical pedagogy, I highly recommend The Learning Paradigm College.

Submit a session proposal for NeMLA's 2027 convention, which will be hosted on the beautiful campus of Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. The dates are Saturday March 6 through Tuesday March 9.  Session proposals are due by May 30! 

https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

Submissions for NeMLA 2027 occur in two stages

Stage 1: Session Proposals (due May 30)

Log into the portal to submit a session proposal (https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login). Session proposal deadline is May 30, 2026 for priority review. Late submissions will be considered until scheduling blocks become full or until June 30, whichever comes first (with rolling notification). Please review the session types (Panel, Seminar, Roundtable, Creative, Workshop). NeMLA sessions may be in three modalities: in-person only, virtual-only, or hybrid.

Stage 2: Session Chairs post calls for papers (June 15 – Sept. 30)

Once your session proposal is vetted and approved, you may issue a call for individual paper abstracts. Guidance on how to serve as a session chair and how to issue the call for papers will be provided in late May. Individual paper submissions will open June 15 and close September 30.

 

2027’s conference theme is “Empowering Communities” 

This theme evokes the process of transformation from a state of passivity to being active agents of change. It represents a shift away from authoritarianism and toward a model that values (and solves problems through) local knowledge, collaboration, and collective action.

Under the theme of empowering communities, we welcome scholarship that examines how cultural knowledge can serve as a source and means of empowerment, the role of culture in constructing agency, and how communities are creating spaces conducive to such empowerment. As always, we welcome proposals that extend, challenge, or bypass the annual theme to make space for everyone’s scholarship and ideas.

The opening plenary will be given by Dr. Jerome Branche, whose current work addresses the interwoven themes of slavery, necropolitics, and coloniality from a transhistoric standpoint.

The keynote address will be given by Manuel Muñoz, the author of a novel and three collections of short stories, most recently The Consequences (Graywolf, 2022), and recipient of the 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

 

Please share the convention information with your department and colleagues. https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

 https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

 associate.director@nemla.org

 Dr. Derek DiMatteo

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This life in academia is actually my second career. I am a combat veteran who came to academic life after spending most of my youth in the Pakistan army. In the process I also made the transition from my primary culture, Pakistan, to that of the United States. Thus, even when I try not to think of my two careers in comparative terms, sometimes I cannot help but think of my life in academia in comparison with my life as a soldier.

While this is a reflective essay about my own life in academia, it is also addressed to all of you out there who are planning a career in academia.

First, I must state outrightly that there is only one group in academia that is in fact the raison de’atre of my career: my students. I find my students to be kind, generous, and deeply interested in learning. Every day I walk into my class, they give me hope and inspiration.

The profession itself, on the other hand, is a totally different story. (The Chronicle of Higher Education also offers various reflective articles on the profession) Bear in mind that my reflections are grounded in my experience in the humanities and may translate differently for those in other fields.

I find life in academia to be an extremely isolating; academy is a place where we all seem to be busy competing for the scraps that university administrators throw at us. The sad part is that most of us have internalized the system of power so deeply that we are not often aware of why or how we are doing certain things. We accept the inherent inequalities of our system as natural and most of us only try to perform our role within these predetermined, unjust, and exploitative boundaries.

Take a look at varied gradations of faculty at any institution of higher learning: we have tenured/ tenure track faculty, contract lecturers, adjunct faculty, and graduate teaching fellows. Out of all these, the tenure track faculty are considered the heart of any department: they have higher salaries, lower teaching loads, and more access to departmental resources. In symbolic terms they also receive a higher degree of departmental and institutional recognition. In most cases, these faculty members also develop an implicit sense of their own superiority.

Now this sense of superiority can only be maintained through willful acts of ignorance and only a little bit of math is enough to dispel such views. But since we are humanists, facts usually tend to be pretty unwelcome in our world. But let us take a look at a hypothetical situation.

Let us assume that the funding model in your state is based on student retention and not just enrollment. This means that you get your state formula funding against the number of students you can retain over a certain period. The quality of instruction and faculty engagement play a huge role in this retention. Now, let us ask what role do tenure track faculty play in this vital function?

So, let us do some basic math. Let us assume a department with twenty tenure track faculty and twenty lecturers. The former teach two courses per semester and mostly teach upper division courses: courses for juniors and seniors. The lecturers teach four courses per semester and these are mostly freshman and sophomore courses. This means that if the classes are capped at twenty five, a TT faculty member will teach fifty juniors or seniors, while a lecturer will teach 100 freshmen or sophomores per semester.

Now, we know that the highest level of attrition at college level is within the first two years, and if we want to improve retention we will have to have a highly motivated and well trained instructional pool. But in practice we have assigned this job to the least paid, overworked and often unappreciated class of faculty: the lecturers! Note also that the TT faculty’s role in student retention, crucial to the viability of the institution, is minimal. They are teaching students who have already decided to finish their degree!

But despite these facts, the people who contribute least to the university’s financial future are often found strutting around the department, as if they are the ones holding the proverbial sky on their shoulders.

Academic departments are also prone to factionalism, favoritism, petty grievances, and isolationist practices. The factionalism is built into the way disciplines are organized. In any given English department there is usually a basic divide between the British literature specialists and the Americanists both of whom see rhetoric and composition parts of the department with varied degree of hostility and suspicion, as if they are still perplexed at what their colleagues in Rhet-comp actually do. Meanwhile, the Brit lit people tend to protect their turf against the ever increasing imperium of American literature. In this “colossal” fight, those of us who teach African American, postcolonial, ethnic, or non-traditional literatures are either reduced to the level of bystanders, if we are lucky, or forced to the margins if we make the mistake of being too uppity or too vocal in our opinions. Chances are the term team player, collegiality, and student enrollment will be employed to convince you of your insignificance if any of your colleagues from the real and mighty English studies decide to come down from their lofty Olympus and actually talk to you.

Most of the times, people trained in traditional sub-fields would either be completely unaware of what you do, or would have a very dismissive attitude toward your area of expertise. I once had a colleague who asked me if I was mostly focused on “public” scholarship? In this person’s view, my work, published with established academic presses, was somehow not “scholarly” enough, as it tended to be “political.”

Then in every department you will find a few who are creatures of the system: they are on every committee, are part of the in-group, and pretty comfortable in being apolitical. These system creatures will always remind you of the rules and of the significance of being a member of the team, but will never “pick” you for the team. They also claim to be leaders in the department, but their leadership mostly involves implementing whatever the dean or the provost tells them and they have neither the vision nor the backbone to actually take a stand for their faculty or for their department. Be extra careful about these system creatures, for they can make your life really hard, and they will also be on every committee in the afterlife as well:)

No doubt, you will make a few good friends, but often you will have to create a support system outside your department. Chances are, if you are part of the non-traditional faculty expertise, you will have a hard time being recognized by your own department even though you could be a well respected scholar in your own field.

As a veteran who still has deep relations with my former military colleagues, I find the life in academia comparatively impoverished and void of deep and lasting human connections. So, as someone on your way to join the professoriate, please remember that academia can be a place of exceptional promise but also of the basest pettiness. As a rule, do your work, make a few good friends, and be generous and kind to your students and to the precarious workers in your department.

Do not make the recognition by your colleagues too central to your happiness, but rather focus on your students, for they are the ones who brought you to teaching in the first place and they are the ones who will give you hope when some of your own peers let you down!

(Note: These views and opinions are based in my reflection and experience and, obviously, do not need to be your views as well. But if you have some thoughts about your own experiences, please do share in the comments)

The Literature and Popular Culture area for the 2026 Northeast Popular Culture Association conference is accepting paper and panel proposals from faculty and graduate students. NEPCA’s 2026 virtual annual conference will be held from Thursday, October 15-Saturday, October 17, 2026. Sessions will take place on Zoom through Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. More information on the conference can be found here: https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers

250-word abstracts are due by June 15, 2026 at 5 pm.

The NEPCA Literature and Popular Culture area welcomes papers that analyze and evaluate the connections between popular culture and literature, understood broadly.  How does popular culture inform and/or react to literature, and what are the implications for that relationship? 

Presentations can discuss many different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives.  Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·         Analyses of individual/multiple works that engage with popular culture.

·         Intersections of popular culture and literature.

·         Retelling of works of literature in popular culture media.

·         Publication, reception and audience of literature and popular culture.

·         Popular culture trends in literature.

·         Literary genres and how they are explored in popular culture.

·         Any other topics that bring together these two areas.

Please submit paper proposals of 250 words via the paper proposal form available on the NEPCA website (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScth-dsuyESpWSgNxubknKghuPpaDtKO0IHaicKWl-yi\_WUtQ/viewform?pli=1) by June 15, 2026 by 5pm.  Please ensure that your proposal is jargon-free and understandable to a broad audience. 

For more information and the broad CFP, please visit the NEPCA website: https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers

Susan Gorman, Area Chair
Literature and Popular Culture
MCPHS University

179 Longwood Avenue

Boston, MA 02115
Email: susan.gorman@mcphs.edu

 https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers

 susan.gorman@mcphs.edu

 Susan Gorman

About ten years ago, my former department went through a collective soul-searching in the process of defining our departmental mission. There were two competing visions of literary studies that became prominently mobilized during our faculty meetings and faculty retreats: one group insisted on teaching literature for its own sake as a complete and self contained body of knowledge and a second group insisted that literature ought to be mobilized to teach the world and, more importantly, to teach more compassionate and just ways of living in the world. Mind you, this was not a cosmetic debate: it was a fight with clearly demarcated battle lines and quite a few of us invested heavily in arguing for and promoting our vision of English studies.

As someone who had come from a colonial educational system, Pakistan, where English was taught as a “subject” and thus only mastery in the subject was considered the height of accomplishment, I was surprised to find that some of my senior colleagues were adamantly in favor of such a model. In this model our job was meant only to deliver the expert knowledge of the subject to our students and any social or political efficacy of this learning was considered, at the least, suspect.

To me, teaching literature cannot just be about “teaching literature.” I often tell my students that they absolutely do not need to know any of the great writers to do well in life or to live a meaningful life. This idea that, somehow, knowing Shakespeare or Milton, or Chaucer can make us better people is a fiction crated and sustained by literature professors. In fact, the results can be completely opposite: literature uncritically taught can make us into cultural snobs with a sort of disdainful view of all those who cannot or do not know how to appreciate literature and art!

In my view, teaching literature may not be akin to “saving the world” but it can be practiced in a way where our students do sometimes, after reading a good book, think of the world. Now, if we can give them the tools to read texts critically and then encourage them to use the same critical tools to “read” the world then chances are they would be interested in investing in a more just and compassionate world. But if we make acute readings of texts in itself a valorized end, then the same students will feel no need to actually think the world anew, for they would deem reading the texts differently, no matter how removed from the world, a fully realized pursuit in itself. The difference between these two approaches may be subtle but the consequential outcomes can be hugely different: one method produces active learners thinking about the world and its inequities, the other looks inward and is focused on resolving the inherent or stylized contradictions of a text, a text that becomes their world!

Personally, I would rather teach the world and since texts are produced and consumed in the world–Edward Said called them worldly–then connecting our teaching to the world can be an extremely important step and literary studies, of all the humanistic disciplines, has the capacity to teach the world!!

Of course, my training in postcolonial studies had already cleansed me of any naive investments in the so-called sanctity of the canon or of any beliefs in natural or inherent superiority of art and literature. To me the best literature can be useless in a classroom if it does not encourage the students to think and live differently.

One of my senior colleagues at that time was seriously invested in the role of literature in teaching social justice and equity and he would often question our more traditional colleagues: are we only supposed to produce copies of our own selves in our graduate program? His hope was that we all would use literature as a transformative tool and not just an end in itself. Needless to say, as most humanities departments we never reached a suitable compromise and the reason, as always, was not the total incommensurability of our views, but the fraught personal histories of several power brokers in the department. I personally learned a lot about literary studies, departmental politics, and about the general nature of our jobs.

May 2026
University of Mannheim - W3-Professur für Neuere deutsche Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft (m/w/d)
Posted on: May 8, 2026

Columbia University - Postdoctoral Research Scholar
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Posted on: May 6, 2026

Hong Kong Shue Yan University - Assistant/Associate/Full Professor of History
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Max Planck Institute for the History of Science - One Postdoctoral Scholar (m/f/d) on “Migratory Expertise and Practices of Knowledge Transmission“
Posted on: May 6, 2026

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Posted on: May 6, 2026

Featured Job Posting
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Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany - Comparative Literature | Academic Councilor as a Lecturer with a specified function at a university [Akademischer Rat/Akademische Rätin (m/w/d) als Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben an einer Hochschule]
Posted on: May 6, 2026

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New Jersey Institute of Technology - Research Associate
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If you are reading this, then you are probably new to r/Humanities. Thank you so much for joining us. We want this to be a welcoming, generous, and stimulating community. You are, obviously, key to making this community a success. Here are some posting ideas and guidelines:

Opinion/ Article Posts

You can post your thoughts and ideas about the humanities in general or about your specific humanistic field of study. Your posts can be analytical, exploratory, argumentative, or simply informative about humanistic subjects and pursuits. We do not have any stipulated Karma requirements, so if your post is original and has some good thoughts and substance, we will approve it and thank you for it!

Announcements

All humanities-related announcements are welcome: Calls for papers, collaboration ventures, seminar or webinar news. In fact, anything humanities-related that you would like to share as an announcement is welcome.

Showcase

If you have published or edited a book, placed an article, or created an educational app, feel free to share it here. Please add enough details so that people get a really good sense of your accomplishments.

Educational Videos

If you produce humanities-related educational videos, you can add the links here with an introduction and, if possible, a transcript, to the video. The best way to post a video is by sharing it using the share button under your YouTube video, choosing Reddit, and then choosing r/Humanities. This way the video will render with a nice thumbnail and not just as a link.

Questions

Last, but not the least, you can post humanities-related questions as a post but make sure you provide some context and also some of your own views about the question and query: it cannot just be one sentence!

Conclusion

Obviously, our conversations here are not limited to just these topics, but these are some of the post “flairs” you can choose if you decide to join the conversation on r/Humanities. So, welcome and let us build this into an exciting and thriving community!

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Introduction

In his first major writing, as a literal and figurative continuation of Pope Francis’s unfinished work, Pope Leo just recently offered his reflections on Dilexit Nos, a cyclical letter started by his predecessor toward the end of his corporeal life. I find his reflections to be a timely and urgent message for our times. In this brief essay, I will share my thoughts on some important aspects of Pope Leo’s reflections. I am neither a Catholic nor religious, but I do believe that powerful religious figures like the Pope with their global reach and appeal can help shape this world into a place of life and love for all.

The Title

The title of Pope Leo’s reflection comes from the book of Revelations and the Pope starts with an explanation of his choice of title:

>I HAVE LOVED YOU” (Rev 3:9). The Lord speaks these words to a Christian community that, unlike some others, had no influence or resources, and was treated instead with violence and contempt: “You have but little power… I will make them come and bow down before your feet” (Rev 3:8-9). This text reminds us of the words of the canticle of Mary: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Lk 1:52-53).

Centrality of the Poor

The Pope in his reflection first proves beyond doubt that Christ himself was poor and materially powerless and considered the poor his people. One could argue that he was sent for the poor. This does not mean that the rich and privileged cannot be recipients of Christ’s message or grace or that one must first become poor to receive the gift of Christ’s love. In my view, what it means is that if we were to look for a natural connection between Christ and his community, his community is the poor not only because he empathizes with them but also because he himself came as a poor, powerless person. Furthermore, the Pope’s reflection suggests, that this connection with the poor has always been part of the Biblical tradition, and thus, the title, Dilexi Te, meaning “I have loved you,” points to what Jesus said to his community, but what is crucial to understand here is that the community of Christians is pretty specific: it is a powerless and poor community. So, when Christ says “I have loved you” it is the very poor and destitute whom he has loved and not the powerful and the mighty. This reading of Christ’s pronouncement makes the very love of the poor almost a raison d’être of Christ’s ministry and mission. The tile of Pope Leo’s reflections, thus, points to the specific role and message of Christ as related to his community, and his community IS the poor, the weak, and the infirm.

The Pope asserts that “the same Jesus who tells us, ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (Mt 26:11), also promises the disciples: ‘I am with you always’ (Mt 28:20)”

Thus, since Christ himself is “poor,” it implies that the poor will always be with Christ and the God and, by extension, a major part of the Christian faith tradition. In his exquisite reflection, as we read it carefully, the Pope, thus, makes the poor as the primary constituency of Christ’s ministry, and hence of his Church, and he further makes the care of the poor central to the Christian practice and not as something secondary. This care of the poor is central because Christ, being poor himself and by declaring his love for the poor, makes it so.

Poverty and the Cult of Riches

Having proven without doubt that Christ himself was poor and that the poor were his people as well as the ultimate community of his ministry, the Pope then offers a strong indictment of the cult of wealth and its function in creating the very conditions that increase and exacerbate conditions for poverty. The Pope writes:

>In fact, the illusion of happiness derived from a comfortable life pushes many people towards a vision of life centered on the accumulation of wealth and social success at all costs, even at the expense of others and by taking advantage of unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest. Thus, in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people.

In these moving passages, the Pope points to the very structures of power and wealth, that some offer as a testament to the success of a capitalist system, as the very conditions that create poverty. The need, therefore, according to Pope Leo, is to change the way we think of success and of poverty. His argument takes us to the very thing that is now being derided and decried by the American pollical right: the need to look at the structural aspects of racism, poverty, and injustice. So, the Pope is now openly and boldly declaring:

>The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice. Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty.

Thus, through clear references to Christ himself, the Pope suggests that the current system of economics and politics needs to be rethought as it is the very grounds upon which the inhuman and inhumane conditions are created and perpetuated. Poverty, thus, cannot simply be attributed to the laziness of individuals in an ever-abundant world, but rather as a natural outcome of a system of privilege and power.

The Pope then goes on to discuss the significance of charity, which, in his view “some dismiss or ridicule,” as the central tenet of Christianity. He writes: “The poor cannot be neglected if we are to remain within the great current of the Church’s life that has its source in the Gospel and bears fruit in every time and place.” [emph. added]

The Poor as God’s Chosen People

In Chapter 2 of his reflection, Pope Leo goes on to argue, through an acute reading of the scripture, that the poor are, in fact, God’s chosen people. This claim partially rests on what the God chose to be when he took human shape:

>Precisely in order to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us. We came to know him in the smallness of a child laid in a manger and in the extreme humiliation of the cross, where he shared our radical poverty, which is death. [emph. added]

So, one could say, for all those believers who absolutely believe that Jesus was God made flesh (which is pretty much all Christian denominations), then it is imperative to reflect on as to what kind of “flesh” did God incarnate took. Instead of coming to the world as a powerful and mighty king, God chose to appear as poor child and died a painful death on the cross, hardly a regal life or a glorious death. Thus, the body that God took was to understand our suffering and not to overpower us with his might. The poor, the weak, the infirm, and the powerless, are thus, God’s people, for he took their shape and experienced their suffering when he walked the earth. Now, the Pope is careful to point out that, even though God came to the world as poor, “this ‘preference’ never indicates exclusivity or discrimination towards other groups, which would be impossible for God.” However, his choice to come as poor and weak, in Pope Leo’s words, is “meant to emphasize God’s actions, which are moved by compassion toward the poverty and weakness of all humanity.” Hence, the Pope argues, the whole purpose of God experiencing a corporeal from of life was:

>to inaugurate a kingdom of justice, fraternity and solidarity, God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his Church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest. [emph. added]

The Pope further suggests, through a careful reading of the Old Testament, that the Biblical God always addressed the poor and we can safely construe that the poor and the weak ARE God’s chosen people. Pope Leo further offers Christ as the “poor Messiah,” as, in Pope Leo’s words, “the Gospel shows us that poverty marked every aspect of Jesus’ life.” So, by the time we read Pope Leo’s reflection on poverty and its integral connection to God’s essential connection to the poor and the weak, there is no doubt left, especially if you are a practicing Christian, that caring for the poor and working toward creating a just world is acting on God’s true intention and an absolutely accurate emulation of Christ’s mission, for Christ, after all, was born poor and died on a cross. The Pope also reminds us that not only did Jesus Walk the earth as a poor and suffering human, he also began his ministry with its intimate connection to the poor: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

Overall, then, there is no doubt left in the inherent connection between the practice of Christian faith and care of the poor, and any attempts at privileging the rich or blaming the poor, thus, come across as Unchristian and against the spirit of Christ himself. To further prove the care of the poor as central to the Christian faith, Pope Leo spends a better part of Chapter three on offering historical examples of charity and care from the early church to the present day. In fact, the Pope concludes:

>Since apostolic times, the Church has seen the liberation of the oppressed as a sign of the Kingdom of God. Jesus himself proclaimed at the beginning of his public ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives” (Lk 4:18).

The Church’s Social Doctrine

In Chapter four of his reflection, the Pope offers a brief history of the Cahtolic Church’s undeniable link to the issues of social justice and equality. After we read through his carefully explained historical account, there is no doubt left in the reader’s mind that Church, by its very pronounced mission and its actions, is an institution grounded in the world and therefore must work in the world. and if the Church is inextricably connected to the care of the poor, then it must continue its mission of working toward justice, which means, in other words, that the Church cannot detach itself from the world and just claim to administer to the matters of faith. Pope Leo describes this mission as follows:

>There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.

This passage, obviously, points to the need for an active role of the Church about social issues that impact people’s lives and, of course, encourages the Church and its followers to work against the neoliberal orthodoxy and market fundamentalism.

In Chapter five, the Pope clearly encourages his Church, its leaders, and the faithful to make the restructuring of the world into a world that neither produces poverty nor despises the poor, so that all can live in peace and dignity, and he offers Christian love as a universal concept and practice to achieve this end. Overall, this long reflection by the current Pope offers a potent and passionate antidote to the normalized power of the elite while also encouraging the followers of the Christ to understand that their faith is incomplete and useless without a commitment to taking care of the poor, the weak, the infirm, and the migrants of the world!

Significance of Pope’s Reflections

In my opinion, the Pope’s assertions in these reflections are timely and absolutely needed against the cruelty and injustice being unleashed by the current US administration.

In this cruel world where the world’s poor and powerless are increasingly being persecuted and further improvised by a cruel and avaricious elite, it is extremely important to hear what the leader of the most powerful religious organization has to say. Let us hope his words guide us to change the world!

Full Text of Dilexi Te

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We often hear, in public and private conversations, that Pakistani culture and politics will become better with the increase in access to education. This is nothing new: almost all nations offer “education” as a panacea, as something that can solve most of their socio-economic problems. In the last decade or so, huge investments have been made in higher education in Pakistan, but a shift in public culture is not so visible. In fact, the culture has become markedly more violent and troubled. So, why is the rise in education not leading to a more egalitarian and progressive culture? And why is it that in some cases, some of the most highly educated youth end up being terrorist sympathizers.

Besides other reasons, it is the lack of a humanistic education that causes so many of our ideological and material problems. But let me clarify my terms: What do I mean by humanistic education? Simply stated, a critical humanistic education focuses on the humanities disciplines that include, but are not limited to: literature, history, and philosophy. But simply including these subjects in our college curricula is not enough. Humanities must be taught to encourage critical thinking, to learn to accept cultural differences, and to encourage the habits of questioning all master narratives. Very rarely are humanities taught in such a way or with this aim in Pakistani universities.

Furthermore, like in the US, most of the higher education funding in Pakistan is reserved for Science-Technology-Engineering-Match (STEM) disciplines. I guess the idea behind this investment is to train and develop a workforce that can compete globally and contribute locally. But if this workforce does not develop the habits of critical thought, then no amount of scientific knowledge would make them into the kind of enlightened and tolerant citizens that any modern nation-state absolutely needs to sustain itself.

There is a vast corpus of research on the role of humanities in what Gayatri Spivak, the renowned postcolonial scholar, calls “training the imagination” of our students. In such a didactic model, students not only learn the subject matter, but also learn the habits of democratic life.

On the day of the successful testing of the US atomic bomb, Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project, said, “I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.” So, on the day that he had achieved his scientific mission, which was the creation of the bomb and its successful launch, Oppenheimer does not speak like a scientist. As a scientist he should have been proud of his accomplishment. He speaks as a humanist.

Thus, while science can give one the knowledge to build or to destroy, only a humanistic education can equip one to know the difference between destructive and salutary acts.

Both Pakistan and India became independent nations because of the hard work of their leaders (and of course their followers) who understood the functioning of the British political system and thus could challenge the British within the rhetorical logic of their own system. Jinnah and Nehru are both good examples of this. These leaders were a product of the British humanistic tradition, but sadly they failed to replicate the very educational system that had produced them.

Now, in the early education sector, private schools do encourage critical thinking and focus a lot on humanities, but in most of the cases, these schools rely on a purely Western curriculum. The students are not really trained to be responsible citizens within Pakistan, but are trained to perform better in foreign universities. A culturally grounded humanistic education would enable the students to know the world but without developing a disdain for their own culture. Thus, a critically aware humanistic education would enable the students to encounter cultural differences without feeling threatened by the difference itself. And this capacity to live with differences is crucial to all modern democracies, but especially for Pakistan where sectarian, regional, gender, and other differences are currently being mobilized to pit our citizens against each other.

But of course, there is yet another question that I must answer. Precisely, how is literature supposed to make us better human beings? In his book Radical Pedagogy, Dr Mark Bracher asserts that we all, in one way or the other, attempt to safeguard our identities and move about in the world with an imperceptible knowledge of all threats to our identities. In order to bring about change in our worldviews, knowledge alone is not enough. We must alter our self-serving narrative through attentive didactics. It is in this attempt to reshape our personal and collective narratives that a humanistic education becomes crucial.

For an average Taliban foot soldier, the narrative is oversimplified: the world is divided between the followers of their own sect and “the rest”. The rest are evildoers and wrong – a threat to the purity of one’s faith. No amount of uninformed education can alter this worldview. Only an informed education that slowly displaces this exclusivist narrative with a more inclusive narrative has some hope of transforming such destructive subjectivities.

Now, all these individuals with a purist view of faith and culture can be trained to be scientists, doctors, and engineers and all that knowledge would probably not alter the narratives upon which the edifices of their selves are built. Only a critically informed humanistic education would have some hope of altering and transforming the core narratives of such people.

On the whole then, for a country like Pakistan, while it is absolutely necessary to develop technological, medical, and other scientific expertise, it is also extremely important to revitalize education in the humanities so that we can produce the kind of human subjectivities that are, besides their scientific training, also trained to imagine and practice life in an increasingly diverse and complex world.

(First published in The Friday Times, Pakistan)

(Photo by CIMT HOOGHLY on Unsplash)