HUFFINGTON
09.15.13
THE BIG QUESTIONS
Americans pursue higher education. A half-century ago, twice
as many students walked across
commencement stages with humanities degrees.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has written and
spoken extensively about the decline of the “humanist vocation,”
began teaching a course at Yale
University last spring about the
commencement speech — like
David Foster Wallace’s “This is
Water,” which was given at Kenyon College in 2005 and became a
book after his death — makes its
way into pop culture. But Brooks
believes we need much more.
“Back in the 1950s, you had Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr;
they were writing books devoted
entirely to these issues,” he said.
“... CAN [WE] SAVE YOUNG PEOPLE LITERALLY DECADES
OF WASTED TIME IN COMING TO THE CONCLUSION
THAT ALMOST EVERYONE DOES GENERATION AFTER
GENERATION: THE THINGS WE THOUGHT WERE IMPORTANT
IN OUR YOUTH... REALLY ARE NOT.”
history of character building. He
said he believes there’s a shortage of people publicly asking the
cosmic questions.
“People are hungry for a certain side of writing about these
issues, but we no longer have
that kind of group of writers
widely discussing how you measure a life,” said Brooks.
On occasion, an awe-inspiring
Heschel, a rabbi who stood on
the front lines of the Selma-toMontgomery marches with Martin
Luther King Jr., also was known
for penning provocative theological
works, like Man Is Not Alone and
God in Search of Man. The works
of Niebuhr, a Christian theologian
and professor at Union Theological
Seminary, include Moral Man and
Immoral Society and The Nature
and Destiny of Man.
“For anyone who goes to church,
these are the questions they are