Category: Uncategorized
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Permanent Crisis Out March 2021
The catalogue copy and landing page for Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age is up with the University of Chicago Press: The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to…
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Information Overload & the Invention of the Modern Research University
On Sunday, June 10, 2012, Helen Dragas, rector of the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors, announced that President Teresa Sullivan and the board had “mutually agreed” that Sullivan would resign. Citing a “rapidly changing” higher education environment, Dragas insisted…
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The Scholar’s Vocation
In 1908, the first study of Germany’s ‘next generation of academics’ was published, written by the German economist Franz Eulenburg. After 200 pages of line graphs and tables, he concluded that they were neither young nor going anywhere. Although some…
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Christian Humanism Is a Wooden Iron
In the brief respite between total wars, most Christian intellectuals in Europe––from Catholics such as Jacques Maritain and Simon Weil to Protestants such as W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis––professed an allegiance to humanism, as did an array of confessing and non-confessing…
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Introduction to “Charisma & Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures”
Paul Reitter and I recently edited a new translation of Max Weber’s two vocation lectures by Damion Searls. NYRB Classics published them this past February. As part of this volume, Paul and I also wrote an introduction: In the summer…
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Weber and the Crisis of the Humanities
In the summer of 1917, a group of university students in Munich invited Max Weber to launch a lecture series on “intellectual work as a vocation” with a talk about the scholar’s work. He was, in a way, an odd…
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On January 28, 2020, NYRB Classics will publish Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by Max Weber, edited by and with an introduction from Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, translated from the German by Damion Searls. In 1919, just months before…
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Intersecting Disciplines
“Chad Wellmon has done a fair bit of dreaming and analyzing over the past four years. Blame it on the fact that he professes an equal love of math and poetry, of science and philosophy. Although he’s now an associate…
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Permanent Crisis
We just submitted the manuscript for Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age.
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Becoming Human
Chad Wellmon 