we are looking for a new story
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We live in the most complex society in history.
Enduring questions about the meaning of human life, the nature of society, and the pursuit of happiness are increasing in importance as the institutions and people devoted to answering them become ever more separate.
Insights fragment as the need for unity and coherence increases, specialization intensifies as we face problems whose only solution lies in communities of cooperation and shared understanding.
The dimensions of culture we might expect to find addressing these problems—religion, the university, politics, business, and the arts—often deepen the gaps instead of closing them.
Each tends to increase the narrowness, partisanship, and fragmentation in our culture even as each possesses unique resources for addressing our common questions and serving the common good.
They all provide pieces of the big picture we need to live well, but the pieces are scattered across the seemingly unbridgeable divides that scar our society: science vs. religion, capitalism vs. socialism, facts vs. values.
If only these separated spheres were connected.
If scientific knowledge, religious insight, political practicality, entrepreneurial innovation and artistic vision were brought into conversation with each other for the public good, what would be possible?
A new vision of the human.
In his scholarship, institutions, and teaching, Samuel specializes in making connections between separated spaces that need each other's wisdom.
As a philosopher, scholar, and consultant, working at the intersection of science, religion, art, and technology, Samuel integrates the past with the present, cultivating an image of the human that is both ancient and new.
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Education embodies our ideal of humanity, and it is the means by which we become ourselves.
When we have forgotten who we are, or no longer agree as a culture, we cannot educate. Education requires clarity about what we believe humans are, for education is the process of becoming human.
Our confusion has led us to conflate schooling, job-training, and certification with education.
For a democracy to flourish, its citizens must be offered the skills needed to participate fully in economic and civil life. That is a demand of the common good, a requisite of our republic.
Training is different than education.
Schooling stops at a certain age; degrees end and are restricted to those with the power to pay.
True education only ends when we do; it is a life-long process and should not be restricted to the privileged elite.
Humans are philosophers destined to achieve the freedom to understand themselves and determine the kind of person they wish to become.
Philosophy is a way of life, not an academic discipline.
Philosophers are a species, homo sapiens, not a professional class. Education is thus a philosophical enterprise.
How can true philosophy be used to renew communities and institutions, as well as offer a better way of thinking when the old stories no longer sustain us?
What is the relationship between science, religion, poetry, and technology?
Why have the dominant environmentalist narratives failed to bring real change, and what must we do to take the plight of the earth seriously?
These questions raise the specter of modernity as the bringer of material benefits but killer of spiritual reality.
Yet precisely this narrative has played easily, and horribly, into the hands of the worst reactionary forces of our times.
Can we take the problems modernity poses for human life seriously while affirming and defending its unique and hopefully irreversible benefits?
We can. But only if we are honest. Only then can real education begin.
We know our current system is broken. We know what we need, but fear to say it: Revolution.
Philosophical education is that revolution.
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As a philosopher-consultant and scholar of religion, Samuel bridges the ancient and modern recovering philosophy as an integrated path to becoming human in a technological age.
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