Editor’s Introduction

We live in a world that seems increasingly less empathetic, trusting, and humane. Calls in Europe to ban or deport African refugees fleeing poverty and despair have grown louder as has the drumbeat to prevent asylum seekers from finding safe haven in the United States. The Internet is awash with angry and dehumanizing screeds about various threatening “others.” Differences in political and cultural perspectives and practices are routinely framed not as vitalizing but endangering and intolerable. Political rhetoric in the age of the tweet descends into an endless stream of lies and counter accusations of “fake news.” Questioning of scientific authority from climate change to hurricane forecasts to vaccinations receives prominent support including from the highest levels of the government. How, we ask ourselves, should we humanists respond in such a cultural and political climate and where can we seek concepts and models to push back against these destructive ideas and forces? The contributors to this issue each in their own way provide at least some answers by looking to past writings and by promoting new ideas that seek to break down seemingly intractable boundaries between “us” and “them” and science and faith and to open a pathway to empathy and trust.

Jonathan Kahn recounts a recent effort at Vassar College to counter the ugliness of the picketing of the school by the infamously homophobic Westboro Baptist Church by organizing a public campus-wide foot washing. Although this “quixotic” effort failed to materialize, Kahn argues that this attempt to emphasize emotive and embodied empathy grounded in religious traditions and supported by affect theory has much potential. He argues that in light of the numerous highly emotionally charged issues impacting campuses and society (including gender, sexual identity, and racial discrimination, “date rape culture,” and accusations of demagoguery and hate speech) such approaches offer a powerful alternative to traditional responses by fully engaging with rather than rationalizing away the intense feelings such issues raise.

Next, James Smith provocatively explores ways to understand the plight of émigrés undertaking physically and psychologically perilous journeys seeking a better life in a new land yet desperately hungry for the comforts of home. How best can they (and we) develop an appreciation for what he labels an “émigré spirituality” that reconciles and honors the mixture of human longing and estrangement that characterizes their experiences? Smith looks to the writings of earlier North African émigrés Albert Camus in his work The Stranger and Saint Augustine of Hippo in his letters and Confessions to explore ways of conceptualizing the real need for the cocoon of indifference to “the life is the road” and the hope for a sense of homeness that characterizes “the migrant soul . . . that is aware of its dependence and is animated by hope.”

Kyle Winkler’s essay “A World Made More Sufferable” is a meditation on the connections and differences between trust, rhetoric, and ordinary language. Grounded in thoughtful readings of ancient texts, predominantly the Iliad and Sophocles’s play Philoctetes, as well as more recent theorists, he blends philosophy, classicism, and cultural studies to illuminate the relations between everyday rhetoric and trust. He also explores the ways the former can be marshalled in ways that can reestablish trust and thus a tolerable society with the possibility of human advancement.

Finally, Christopher White’s fascinating essay uncovers the ways Christians and other believers in Europe and America worked to reconcile new scientific discoveries, from electricity to the mathematical study of space to quantum mechanics, to their traditional religious values in ways that let them find intersections between the temporal world and higher plane transcendence. Rather than seeing the age of science as antithetical to religiosity, White instead reveals how new secular scientific discoveries and ideas actually stimulated new forms of spiritual thinking and allowed many to reconcile older religious viewpoints with a modern scientific sensibility.

We conclude the issue with interpretative reviews of recent films and books. R.J. Cardullo reviews the films Lila Says by Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri and My Summer of Love by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski as examples of using non-exploitative “serious” sex and sexuality to advance larger significant social themes...