The calming voice of Mark Schwehn in Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (OUP 1993) is one I find useful, calling for understanding all that we do as teaching and a reframing of that work around notions of phillia and charity. Citing Leon Kass, he describes the objectives of our work as follows:
colleges and universities ought to provide education ‘in and for thoughtfulness.’ The word thoughtfulness conveys, as Kass has noted, both the notion of being filled with reflections about important matters of human concern and the notion of being considerate of others. The same double meaning applies to the corresponding vice: to be thoughtless is to be both foolish and inconsiderate. . . . I have been suggesting that one cannot be truly thoughtful in either of the two senses Kass specified without being thoughtful in the other as well. (p. 58.)
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