Getting the Flu: A Four-Day Forced Meditation Retreat

by Matt B. on March 31, 2013

I haven’t left the house much over the last couple of days. My sheets are bunched up at the foot of the bed, clothes are strewn all over the floor, and containers of half-eaten soup and Emergen-C scan the wasteland from their perches on desktops and chairs. It’s been wonderful. In fact, it’s a lot [...]

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Marxist Army Officer Chris Helali on Buddhism, Marx, and the Democratic Left

December 12, 2012

Christopher Helali – Marxist, U.S. Army Officer, community college professor, and graduate student at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology –  has some things to say. In what follows, we discuss Buddhism, Marxism, Carl Sagan, the Acropolis, Keynesian economics, Ayn Rand, intersubjectivity, Bill Clinton, John Locke, and Slavoj Žižek. MATT BIEBER: You describe yourself as a [...]

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Teaching Marx at Harvard: An Interview with Steven Jungkeit

December 11, 2012

Steve Jungkeit is a Lecturer on Ethics at Harvard Divinity School. He holds a PhD in Modern Christian Thought from Yale, and he is the author of Spaces of Modern Theology: Geography and Power in Schleiermacher’s World. Jungkeit is also an ordained Presbyterian minister and a father of three. This semester, Jungkeit is teaching the only course [...]

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If You Have $250 Million, You Shouldn’t Be President

October 24, 2012

Just for a moment, let’s put aside questions of economic policy. Let’s also put aside questions about how Mitt Romney made his money, or about the moral legitimacy of the system that allowed him to make money in the ways that he did. For just a second, let’s focus on the money itself and what [...]

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Education and “The Public Promotion of Moral Genius”: An Interview with Peter Hershock

August 5, 2012

Peter Hershock is the author of Buddhism in the Public Sphere, one of the most interesting books about public policy that I have ever read. The book presents a set of Buddhist perspectives on a series of political and policy challenges. Each chapter – which cover issues as varied as the environment and terrorism – [...]

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Buddhist Activism and Public Policy: An Interview with Jonathan Watts of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists

July 31, 2012

Jonathan Watts is a member of the executive board of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). He is also the coordinator of Think Sangha, a Buddhist think tank affiliated with INEB.  In addition, he is a fellow at the Jodo Shu Research Institute in Tokyo, a fellow at the International Buddhist Exchange Center in [...]

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Case Dismissed! Charges Dropped in My Bizarre Arrest at a January Romney Event

July 15, 2012

In January, I had one of the weirder and more unsettling experiences of my life – after (possibly) being mistaken for a protester, I was removed and then arrested for “criminal trespass” at a public Mitt Romney event in Hudson, NH. Recently, I got some great news: the case has been dismissed! No charges, no trial, [...]

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“President Obama is a Screen Onto Which We Project our Most Intimate Affinities and Intense Anxieties”: Harvard’s Tim McCarthy on the Cult of Consensus, President Obama’s Cognitive Dissonance, and How American Can Avoid Ending Up Like the Roman Empire

May 24, 2012

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is core faculty and director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He also served as a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council. This interview took place in March, when Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were [...]

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What is College For? An Interview with The New Yorker’s Louis Menand

May 1, 2012

Louis Menand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer for the New Yorker. His most recent book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, traces the rise of the modern university system and asks hard questions about whether higher education’s historical goals and structures are [...]

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The Evasion of Ethics at Harvard Kennedy School, Or Why Digging Deep into Ethics Makes Us Better Policymakers

April 30, 2012

We face enormous challenges: global warming, poverty, health care, terrorism. Dealing with these challenges requires deep thinking about a range of moral questions. What is it to be a human being? How do we work? What’s good for us? What do we owe to one another? Unfortunately, HKS doesn’t do much to encourage this kind [...]

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