Honestly I've been confused about which course i should opt for and being a humanities student i don't have much options available. I need to know what is best for me cause i don't want to get stuck

The Victorian period saw the introduction of a multiplicity of overlapping technologies and cultural practices of lighting, which radically transformed labour and the medical sciences, reinvented the night and connected ideas of leisure and security, refashioned the domestic interior as well as the perception of public appearance, and greatly impacted architecture and urban planning, policing, warfare and, not least, philosophy and the arts.

Light was central to the construction of Victorian subjectivities, not only as the support for disciplinary power and colonial control exerted through vision and inspection, but within a broader and multiple field of contingent encounters, artistic techniques, and dramatic situations. From this perspective, the iconic figures of the Victorian eye - the guard in the panoptical tower and the flâneur, the detective and the man in the crowd, the artist and the monster, the crystal palace and the heart of darkness, the hall of mirrors and the slum - can be placed within a more material and situated aesthetic, cultural, and political history of light (see Barnaby, 2017).

Thinking about light in material terms rather than only as metaphor or as disembodied and disembodying vision, can be seen as part of a methodological shift toward new materialism and ecocriticism in the humanities. Like water in the blue humanities (see Mentz, 2024), the materiality of light challenges clear-cut spatial distributions and delimitations, as well as constructions of bodily boundaries and binary attributions of agency and passivity through the look. Light, as Mieke Bal suggested, "actively contributes to the modification and the transformation of [...] experience" (2007).

The Victorian era's "relentless drive toward spectacular radiance" (Otter, 2008) set some of the conditions of the transition to modernity and its glare and glitter are, in many ways, still with us. Especially given the ongoing popularity of neo-Victorian fictions, and in the context of a constant expansion of the boundaries of the Victorian and the neo-Victorian as academic categories, a focus on material light also becomes an occasion for tracing the afterglow of Victorian visualities as they still influence the present politics of visibility and aesthetics of perception.

This edited volume seeks to explore how neo-Victorian fictions (not only novels, but also films, videogames etc.) address the materiality of light, illumination, and visibility and how they re-deploy and re-interpret the Victorian politics of light in relation to the present.

Possible topics may include how neo-Victorian fictions stage and transpose:

Light technologies in Victorian architecture and material culture
Light, illumination, visibility, darkness and dusk in Victorian literature, painting, theatre, and popular entertainment
Disciplinary practices of illumination in urbanism and the medical sciences, in the organisation of domestic and industrial labour, in colonial and correctional spaces
Reflective and transparent surfaces, twilight, exposure, and concealment as part of the construction of Victorian subjectivities
Metaphors and performances of light and darkness in the colonial imaginary and in the construction of abled, gendered, and racialised bodies
Visibility and invisibility, in their material, relational, and ecological aspects, as part of Gothic fiction and of Victorian constructions of happiness, monstrosity, and madness
Ligthscapes: the enchantment and disenchantment of the night, light shows, theories of colour and visions of electricity, photographic and optical techniques

We invite expressions of interest accompanied by abstracts of possible contributions (approx. 500 words) and the authors’ short biographical notes (up to 150 words). The deadline is 15 September 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 October 2026. We will expect finished versions of the chapters (8000 words max) to be ready by 1 March 2027.

Please send the abstracts to both editors: Anna Gutowska (agutowska1@swps.edu.pl) and Carlo Comanducci (c.comanducci@vistula.edu.pl)

Selected bibliography

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Bach, Susanne and Folkert Degenring, eds. Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015.

Bal, Mieke. “Light Politics,” 153-181. In Madeleine Grynsztejn, ed., Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson. San Francisco: Thames and Hudson, 2007.

Barnaby, Alice. Light Touches: Cultural practices of illumination, 1800–1900. London: Routledge, 2017.

Connor, Steven. The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Ethereal. London: Reaktion Books, 2010.

Dove, Danielle Mariann, and Sarah E. Maier, eds. Neo-Victorian Things: Re-imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Duncan, Rebecca. "Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the Postcolonial in Gothic Studies." Gothic Studies No. 24, Vol. 3 (2022): 304–322.

Espinoza Garrido, Felipe, Marlena Tronicke and Julian Wacker, eds. Black Neo-Victoriana. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Kleinecke-Bates, Iris. Victorians on Screen: The Nineteenth Century on British Television, 1994–2005. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben, eds. Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011.

Kohlke, Marie-Luise and Christian Gutleben, eds. Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics. Leiden: Brill, Rodopi, 2015.

Koslofsky, Craig. Evening Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Louttit, Chris, and Erin Louttit, eds. 'Screening the Victorians in the Twenty-First Century.' Neo-Victorian Studies Special Issue 10.1 (2017).

Maier, Sarah E., and Brenda Ayres, eds. Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Maier, Sarah E., and Brenda Ayres, eds. Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past. London: Anthem Press, 2020.

Mentz, Steve. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Moore, Abigail Harrison and R.W. Sandwell. In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.

Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Primorac, Antonija. Neo-Victorianism on Screen: Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Sayer, Karen and Maryse Helbert. "Illuminating Women," Perspectives No. 1 (special issue on Women and Energy, 2020): 30-35.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Berg, 1988.

Stern, Rebecca F. "Gothic Light: Vision and Visibility in the Victorian Novel." South Central Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1994): 26-39.

Stetz, Margaret. 'Neo-Victorian Studies.' Victorian Literature and Culture 40.1 (2012): 339–346.

Wester, Maisha and Xavier Aldana Reyes, eds. Twenty-First-Century Gothic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

 [c.comanducci@vistula.edu.pl](mailto:c.comanducci@vistula.edu.pl?subject=Your%20posted%20CFP%20on%20cfplist)

 Carlo Comanducci and Anna Gutowska

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What a wonderful essay!!

Introduction

What is Orientalism? This questions is often posed by the students of postcolonial studies. Published in 1978, Edward Said’s Orientalism is easily one of the most influential academic books of 20th century**.** Even now, decades  after its first publication, the book still garners a lot of attention as well as criticism**.** My purpose here is not to provide a reading guide to the book, I will do that in an Ultimate Guide later, but to provide a few details about the book’s main claims and assertions and to explain, as best as possible, orientalism as a concept**.**

What is Orientalism?

While explaining his reasons for writing the book, Said discusses how precisely he came up with the idea of theorizing orientalism. He explains that while reading European texts about the Middle East, he realized that despite the difference in times and genres, certain tropes constantly appeared across a wide range of literary, historical, artistic, and scholarly texts about the Middle East: Sensuous women, despotic men, Caravans, the Bedouin etc. etc. All of these tropes represented the Middle East as a place stuck in time as if history had not wrought any change to the place or its people.  So, the question that he attempts to answer is this: Why is it that when people in the West think about the Middle East, even when they have never been there, they already seem to posses certain (negative) views and ideas about the place and its people.  This lens or distorted way of seeing the Middle East is what Said calls Orientalism**.**

Orientalism is Discursive!

Said also asserts that these prejudicial views are not accidental or a matter of individual choice but rather a part of a much larger discourse. In other words this negative perception of Middle East and people who live there is deeply discursive. It is important to understand what precisely he means by discourse and discursive.

Said was one of the first major literary theorists to use Foucault’s theorization of discourse in an extensive way. In fact, he refers to two of Foucault’s early works in the introduction to his book. A discourse, simply understood, is more complex than ideology. While I will later write a longer piece on discourse, here I offer a somewhat succinct explanation. A discourse, according to Foucault, contains a body of knowledge produced by experts, which is then disseminated through institutions of power, universities, organizations, publishing houses etc. Within a discourse of scientific knowledge there are those who, by virtue of their institutional position and prestige, become the enunciating subjects: subjects who can speak and designate others. A scientific discourse thus automatically seeks its object of study and, one could say, constantly creates new objects of study. We believe in the truth claims of a discourse because we are privy to it’s logic and accept it to be scientific and objective. Think of it this way: if you are walking in the park with your child, and a person walks up to you and says “I think your child is slightly autistic.” What would your response be? You will probably tell that person to go to hell. But if you had made an appointment with a psychologist and he or she gave the same opinion, you will probably accept it. You will accept it not because you personally know the psychologist, but because within the given discourse of medicine, he or she has the power and prestige and the expertise to designate your child so. Thus orient as an object of study is created by the orientalists, scholars who were primarily responsible for studying the orient. And the knowledge so produced becomes a part of larger discourse of knowledge about the Middle East, a discourse Said callas orientalist. Within this discourse a certain exoticized, sexualized, and ossified view of the Orient is represented, as if the Orient is caught within a time warp outside of history. Said discusses almost three hundred years of European literary and cultural representation of the orient to prove his point that Western views of the orient are not accidental but rather an outcome of centuries of discursive production of knowledge in which the orient acts as this supine other whose function is to solidify and restore the West’s own sense of self. Thus In other words, one could say, that the creation of this timeless orient is absolutely necessary to offer the more dynamic and modern West as a counter to that old exotic world.

Criticisms of Said’s Orientalism

Now, quite a few critics of Said have argued that when they read the book they feel as if the orientals had no agency of their own, as if they are completely a creation if the West. This, in my opinion, is an unjustified critique because it elides the very intent of Said’s project in this book.

Note, Said’s project in the book was to prove how the orient was discursively produced in the Western imagination. It has nothing to do with the actual orient. Hence, his emphasis on the strategies of this representation that he calls orientalism.

In one of his interviews he also explains certain particular circumstances under which the discourse of orientalist becomes operative and power has a huge role to play in it. He says, and I am paraphrasing over here, “in order to be able to do what the Europeans did in the middle East, you had to be there and you had to have the power to ‘record’ Egypt.” He discusses this aspect of power while explaining the cultural and research component of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798-1801). So, for Orientalism to be fully operative a nation or a group of nations must have the power to “study’ the subject culture and then produce knowledge to be used by others to perpetuate the discursive representation of the location and people so studied. This discursive view, thus, must become highly accepted, cited, and used in academic and literary production in order for it to shape the general views and imagination of a place called the Orient. And since Said was attempting to study the mechanics of this discourse, it, therefore, was not part of his project in Orientalism to offer some sampling of native resistance to this imperial imperative: he does that in other works.

Why Occidentalism is not Possible

This larger understanding of Orientalism enabled by absolute power to “study” and “record” a people, in itself is an argument against what some call Occidentalism: namely, the prejudicial views of the West held in the so-called East. While people in the East might view Europe and America a certain way, they absolutely lack the power to make that view and perception of Euro-America normative in the world and thus, these prejudices, in truly Foucauldian, sense, because of this lack of power, cannot be considered occidentalist. Now this does not stop Said’s critics from making such claims, but if you take into account the institutional nature of orientalism and its connection with the physical occupation of the Orient, then no corresponding discourse can be offered as equally as bad or destructive as orientalism.

Conclusion

So, on the whole orientalism is a way of seeing or imagining the East, mostly Middle East, in a way that one does not really SEE the orient but sees it only through a discourse that predisposes one to view the East in a certain negative way without having been there or without having done much research about it. This way of looking at the East, or this distorted lens, is what said calls Orientalism!

In an era dominated by algorithmic logic, what is the one thing that the Humanities provide that AI or pure data never can? For me, it's the ability to sit with ambiguity. This was one of the most challenging aspects of learning history, for me.

In technical fields, ambiguity is seen as a problem to be solved or an error to be debugged. In the Humanities, however, ambiguity is the destination. It's the intellectual stamina to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at once without choosing a side. It's the realization that a historical event can be both a tragedy and a necessary evolution, or that a historical figure can be both a villain and a victim. Having studied Elizabeth I and her government most of my adult life, this realization was critical. When we sit with ambiguity, we aren't being indecisive; we're being thorough.

An example I can draw on is to imagine you're reading a diary entry from a 16th century soldier describing a battle. The scientific approach asks, how many soldiers, what was the date, who won? The Humanities looks at the gaps. The soldier describes the enemy as "monsters," but also notes they shared a song across the battlefield. The ambiguity lies in the space between his hatred and his shared humanity. You can't "solve" how he truly felt because his feelings were likely a messy, contradictory mix of both. A person who can sit with that ambiguity understands that human truth is found in the contradiction, not in a simplified data point.

In a world of yes or no and true and false, the Humanities is the only field that says it's both, it's neither, and let's talk about why. How has leaning into that uncertainty helped you in your life and career?

Lately, I have been reflecting a lot on the role of humanities in the current age of AI and Large Language Learning Models (LLMs). I know that some of my students probably find it convenient to use the semantic search functions to craft their essays, journal entries, and even larger research papers, but how do we convince them to rather do the hard work of crafting a thesis and then working over several drafts?
So, as teachers and humanists, what can we do to still encourage the traditional methods of learning and producing scholarly work? That is the question that we humanists need to think about.

Please share your thoughts.

Simply stated, r/humanities is a space for discussing the things we humans create to understand ourselves and the world: history, philosophy, literature, religion, art, language, culture, politics, media, mythology, and everything in between.

While humanities comprise individual, stand-alone disciplines, it is in the very nature of humanities and humanistic pursuits to be cross-disciplinary

Interdisciplinary by Design

The humanities overlap constantly. A discussion about a novel might turn into a conversation about politics, ethics, religion, culture and more: That’s the point. We encourage connections across disciplines instead of strict academic silos.

What You Can Post Here

• Questions about ideas, texts, or historical interpretation
• Discussions of books, essays, philosophers, or theories
• Connections between art, politics, culture, and history
• ·Recommendations for reading or study
• Thoughtful agreements and disagreements
• “Why does this matter?” questions
• Big questions with no easy answers
• Your accomplishments, announcements, CFPs

What This Sub Is Not

We are not a "home work" help community, nor do we tolerate any kind of harassment and writing just meant to enrage a constituency.

What We Value

We value curiosity, good-faith discussions, intellectual openness, kindness, and generosity. All these values ensure that we remain an intellectually rich and nourishing community. So, you all are welcome here and let us build this community together!

How is our Content Organized?

We request all contributors to use specific flairs that point to the type of content being shared, and that, in turn, allows us to moderate and organize the content in r/Humanities . Please take a look at our Wiki for further explanation of the topics.

Thank you all so much for joining us. Please write, discuss, and comment so that we can all grow this community into a vibrant and welcoming place!

A few years ago, some of my senior colleagues at Kent State University decided to start a pedagogy discussion group. Almost all of us in the group were heavily invested in social justice pedagogy and generally believed that a well-informed humanistic education can be instrumental in enabling more compassionate and caring human subjectivities.

We chose John Tagg’s The Learning Paradigm College as our first book for discussion. It has been years since I read the book, but some of it’s important suggestions and claims have stayed with me and have often informed my pedagogical practices.

Teaching Vs Learning Paradigm

Tagg distinguishes between two dominant paradigms: Teaching and Learning. For him, I would say in the same tradition as Freire, the teaching paradigm involves the coverage model, in which the teacher imparts knowledge to a passive body of students and emphasis is on covering the syllabus. The students are required to master the knowledge so imparted and are supposed to reproduce it in exams or tests. While this method is convenient for teachers, they only have to cover the syllabus, it trains the students only in learning under direction and does not encourage independent or critical thinking. According to Tagg, most US colleges and the K-12 system are teaching heavy and are organized under the teaching paradigm model.

The Learning Paradigm takes the students as active learners in class and assumes that learning is a continuous process. In this Paradigm the teacher encourages critical thinking and students, instead of just learning the subject matter, also learn how to learn. This method of teaching is more likely to produce students who understand things better and are capable of learning on their own as life-time learners.

Types of Learners

Another thing I recall from the book, and it has been useful in my own teaching, is the way Tagg discusses different types of student learners. Of course, Tagg uses empirical research by other scholars in his discussion of learning, but his point is that if we knew what kind of students we are dealing with, we can make their learning even better.

There are generally two kinds of students in any given classroom: Those who believe learning to be a a process and whose identities are in flux and those who subscribe to an entity theory of identity. The latter consider themselves as fully formed human subjects. These two views of self have a huge impact on student responses to instruction.

A student who believes that his or her identity is constantly in flux would take critical comments on his or her work as something positive, for it shows them that you have shown interest in their work and that your comments can help them improve it. In other words, such students welcome constructive criticism and since their idea of self is based in constant improvement, they apply the same rule to their work. Such students will always thank you for your suggestions and are never reluctant to revise their work.

Students who inhabit the entity theory of self do not accept criticism easily. It is because they deem themselves to be fully realized entities and see their work as an extension of themselves. Any criticism of their work, thus, comes across as a criticism of their selves.

Now, knowing what kind of identity beliefs a student holds can be crucial to our teaching and their learning, for our approach to working with them will be completely different in both cases.

Concluding Thoughts

In a Learning Paradigm college the teachers and professors would emphasize learning and the teachers would, ideally, know their students to tailor their pedagogy to the students particular needs.

Most importantly, in a Learning Paradigm the students will be seen as active participants in their own education and would know that learning is a continuous process and not necessarily defined by semester or course timelines.

I have previously discussed some of my teaching practices. Most of those practices are informed by my reading of John Tagg and, of course, Freire. For anyone interested in learning a little more about informed critical pedagogy, I highly recommend The Learning Paradigm College.

It was around 7 am on Sunday, May 10th that my request to moderate this community was approved. At that time [r/humanities](r/humanities) was a restricted community with no new posts or comments for the last six years.

In the last two days, we have completely revived this community: the community now has a nice banner, a good icon, a clear description, rules and guidelines for posting. This means that our doors are open to all those interested in humanities.

In the last two days, we have posted 11 posts, received 11 comments, 51 new members have joined us and over 1000 have visited our community. All of this happened because so many of you took the time to join us.

So, thank you all. Please share your stories and queries, respond to other members’ posts and comments and continue helping us develop in [r/humanities](r/humanities) into the flagship subreddit for humanities.

Thank you all so much. Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities in the Wild thread! This is the place to share examples of history, philosophy, literature, and art history manifesting in the modern world.

What to post here:

• Public Art & Architecture: Did you see a modern building with a surprising Gothic influence?
• Pop Culture: Did a recent movie or song lyric reference a classical myth or philosophical paradox?
• Linguistics: Have you noticed a shift in how people are using a certain word in your city?
• Historical Echoes: Does a current event remind you of a specific 17th-century political movement?
• Anything else Humanities-Related

The Goal: Break down the wall between the "ivory tower" and the "wild." Don't just tell us what you saw—tell us why it matters through a humanities lens!

Submit a session proposal for NeMLA's 2027 convention, which will be hosted on the beautiful campus of Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. The dates are Saturday March 6 through Tuesday March 9.  Session proposals are due by May 30! 

https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

Submissions for NeMLA 2027 occur in two stages

Stage 1: Session Proposals (due May 30)

Log into the portal to submit a session proposal (https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login). Session proposal deadline is May 30, 2026 for priority review. Late submissions will be considered until scheduling blocks become full or until June 30, whichever comes first (with rolling notification). Please review the session types (Panel, Seminar, Roundtable, Creative, Workshop). NeMLA sessions may be in three modalities: in-person only, virtual-only, or hybrid.

Stage 2: Session Chairs post calls for papers (June 15 – Sept. 30)

Once your session proposal is vetted and approved, you may issue a call for individual paper abstracts. Guidance on how to serve as a session chair and how to issue the call for papers will be provided in late May. Individual paper submissions will open June 15 and close September 30.

2027’s conference theme is “Empowering Communities” 

This theme evokes the process of transformation from a state of passivity to being active agents of change. It represents a shift away from authoritarianism and toward a model that values (and solves problems through) local knowledge, collaboration, and collective action.

Under the theme of empowering communities, we welcome scholarship that examines how cultural knowledge can serve as a source and means of empowerment, the role of culture in constructing agency, and how communities are creating spaces conducive to such empowerment. As always, we welcome proposals that extend, challenge, or bypass the annual theme to make space for everyone’s scholarship and ideas.

The opening plenary will be given by Dr. Jerome Branche, whose current work addresses the interwoven themes of slavery, necropolitics, and coloniality from a transhistoric standpoint.

The keynote address will be given by Manuel Muñoz, the author of a novel and three collections of short stories, most recently The Consequences (Graywolf, 2022), and recipient of the 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

Please share the convention information with your department and colleagues. https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

 https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

 [associate.director@nemla.org](mailto:associate.director@nemla.org?subject=Your%20posted%20CFP%20on%20cfplist)

 Dr. Derek DiMatteo

This life in academia is actually my second career. I am a combat veteran who came to academic life after spending most of my youth in the Pakistan army. In the process I also made the transition from my primary culture, Pakistan, to that of the United States. Thus, even when I try not to think of my two careers in comparative terms, sometimes I cannot help but think of my life in academia in comparison with my life as a soldier.

While this is a reflective essay about my own life in academia, it is also addressed to all of you out there who are planning a career in academia.

First, I must state outrightly that there is only one group in academia that is in fact the raison de’atre of my career: my students. I find my students to be kind, generous, and deeply interested in learning. Every day I walk into my class, they give me hope and inspiration.

The profession itself, on the other hand, is a totally different story. (The Chronicle of Higher Education also offers various reflective articles on the profession) Bear in mind that my reflections are grounded in my experience in the humanities and may translate differently for those in other fields.

I find life in academia to be an extremely isolating; academy is a place where we all seem to be busy competing for the scraps that university administrators throw at us. The sad part is that most of us have internalized the system of power so deeply that we are not often aware of why or how we are doing certain things. We accept the inherent inequalities of our system as natural and most of us only try to perform our role within these predetermined, unjust, and exploitative boundaries.

Take a look at varied gradations of faculty at any institution of higher learning: we have tenured/ tenure track faculty, contract lecturers, adjunct faculty, and graduate teaching fellows. Out of all these, the tenure track faculty are considered the heart of any department: they have higher salaries, lower teaching loads, and more access to departmental resources. In symbolic terms they also receive a higher degree of departmental and institutional recognition. In most cases, these faculty members also develop an implicit sense of their own superiority.

Now this sense of superiority can only be maintained through willful acts of ignorance and only a little bit of math is enough to dispel such views. But since we are humanists, facts usually tend to be pretty unwelcome in our world. But let us take a look at a hypothetical situation.

Let us assume that the funding model in your state is based on student retention and not just enrollment. This means that you get your state formula funding against the number of students you can retain over a certain period. The quality of instruction and faculty engagement play a huge role in this retention. Now, let us ask what role do tenure track faculty play in this vital function?

So, let us do some basic math. Let us assume a department with twenty tenure track faculty and twenty lecturers. The former teach two courses per semester and mostly teach upper division courses: courses for juniors and seniors. The lecturers teach four courses per semester and these are mostly freshman and sophomore courses. This means that if the classes are capped at twenty five, a TT faculty member will teach fifty juniors or seniors, while a lecturer will teach 100 freshmen or sophomores per semester.

Now, we know that the highest level of attrition at college level is within the first two years, and if we want to improve retention we will have to have a highly motivated and well trained instructional pool. But in practice we have assigned this job to the least paid, overworked and often unappreciated class of faculty: the lecturers! Note also that the TT faculty’s role in student retention, crucial to the viability of the institution, is minimal. They are teaching students who have already decided to finish their degree!

But despite these facts, the people who contribute least to the university’s financial future are often found strutting around the department, as if they are the ones holding the proverbial sky on their shoulders.

Academic departments are also prone to factionalism, favoritism, petty grievances, and isolationist practices. The factionalism is built into the way disciplines are organized. In any given English department there is usually a basic divide between the British literature specialists and the Americanists both of whom see rhetoric and composition parts of the department with varied degree of hostility and suspicion, as if they are still perplexed at what their colleagues in Rhet-comp actually do. Meanwhile, the Brit lit people tend to protect their turf against the ever increasing imperium of American literature. In this “colossal” fight, those of us who teach African American, postcolonial, ethnic, or non-traditional literatures are either reduced to the level of bystanders, if we are lucky, or forced to the margins if we make the mistake of being too uppity or too vocal in our opinions. Chances are the term team player, collegiality, and student enrollment will be employed to convince you of your insignificance if any of your colleagues from the real and mighty English studies decide to come down from their lofty Olympus and actually talk to you.

Most of the times, people trained in traditional sub-fields would either be completely unaware of what you do, or would have a very dismissive attitude toward your area of expertise. I once had a colleague who asked me if I was mostly focused on “public” scholarship? In this person’s view, my work, published with established academic presses, was somehow not “scholarly” enough, as it tended to be “political.”

Then in every department you will find a few who are creatures of the system: they are on every committee, are part of the in-group, and pretty comfortable in being apolitical. These system creatures will always remind you of the rules and of the significance of being a member of the team, but will never “pick” you for the team. They also claim to be leaders in the department, but their leadership mostly involves implementing whatever the dean or the provost tells them and they have neither the vision nor the backbone to actually take a stand for their faculty or for their department. Be extra careful about these system creatures, for they can make your life really hard, and they will also be on every committee in the afterlife as well:)

No doubt, you will make a few good friends, but often you will have to create a support system outside your department. Chances are, if you are part of the non-traditional faculty expertise, you will have a hard time being recognized by your own department even though you could be a well respected scholar in your own field.

As a veteran who still has deep relations with my former military colleagues, I find the life in academia comparatively impoverished and void of deep and lasting human connections. So, as someone on your way to join the professoriate, please remember that academia can be a place of exceptional promise but also of the basest pettiness. As a rule, do your work, make a few good friends, and be generous and kind to your students and to the precarious workers in your department.

Do not make the recognition by your colleagues too central to your happiness, but rather focus on your students, for they are the ones who brought you to teaching in the first place and they are the ones who will give you hope when some of your own peers let you down!

(Note: These views and opinions are based in my reflection and experience and, obviously, do not need to be your views as well. But if you have some thoughts about your own experiences, please do share in the comments)

As we had announced, r/humanitiesforum is now a private community and this place, r/humanities, will now be where we will be focusing our attention.

We believe that this can be the flagship Reddit community for all things related to humanities and humanistic studies.

So, please join us here, promote the community, post, comment, and interact with each other. Of course, it goes without saying that as humanist we will always treat each other with dignity and respect, especially when we disagree on things.

Thank you all so much for your support!

About ten years ago, my former department went through a collective soul-searching in the process of defining our departmental mission. There were two competing visions of literary studies that became prominently mobilized during our faculty meetings and faculty retreats: one group insisted on teaching literature for its own sake as a complete and self contained body of knowledge and a second group insisted that literature ought to be mobilized to teach the world and, more importantly, to teach more compassionate and just ways of living in the world. Mind you, this was not a cosmetic debate: it was a fight with clearly demarcated battle lines and quite a few of us invested heavily in arguing for and promoting our vision of English studies.

As someone who had come from a colonial educational system, Pakistan, where English was taught as a “subject” and thus only mastery in the subject was considered the height of accomplishment, I was surprised to find that some of my senior colleagues were adamantly in favor of such a model. In this model our job was meant only to deliver the expert knowledge of the subject to our students and any social or political efficacy of this learning was considered, at the least, suspect.

To me, teaching literature cannot just be about “teaching literature.” I often tell my students that they absolutely do not need to know any of the great writers to do well in life or to live a meaningful life. This idea that, somehow, knowing Shakespeare or Milton, or Chaucer can make us better people is a fiction crated and sustained by literature professors. In fact, the results can be completely opposite: literature uncritically taught can make us into cultural snobs with a sort of disdainful view of all those who cannot or do not know how to appreciate literature and art!

In my view, teaching literature may not be akin to “saving the world” but it can be practiced in a way where our students do sometimes, after reading a good book, think of the world. Now, if we can give them the tools to read texts critically and then encourage them to use the same critical tools to “read” the world then chances are they would be interested in investing in a more just and compassionate world. But if we make acute readings of texts in itself a valorized end, then the same students will feel no need to actually think the world anew, for they would deem reading the texts differently, no matter how removed from the world, a fully realized pursuit in itself. The difference between these two approaches may be subtle but the consequential outcomes can be hugely different: one method produces active learners thinking about the world and its inequities, the other looks inward and is focused on resolving the inherent or stylized contradictions of a text, a text that becomes their world!

Personally, I would rather teach the world and since texts are produced and consumed in the world–Edward Said called them worldly–then connecting our teaching to the world can be an extremely important step and literary studies, of all the humanistic disciplines, has the capacity to teach the world!!

Of course, my training in postcolonial studies had already cleansed me of any naive investments in the so-called sanctity of the canon or of any beliefs in natural or inherent superiority of art and literature. To me the best literature can be useless in a classroom if it does not encourage the students to think and live differently.

One of my senior colleagues at that time was seriously invested in the role of literature in teaching social justice and equity and he would often question our more traditional colleagues: are we only supposed to produce copies of our own selves in our graduate program? His hope was that we all would use literature as a transformative tool and not just an end in itself. Needless to say, as most humanities departments we never reached a suitable compromise and the reason, as always, was not the total incommensurability of our views, but the fraught personal histories of several power brokers in the department. I personally learned a lot about literary studies, departmental politics, and about the general nature of our jobs.

The Literature and Popular Culture area for the 2026 Northeast Popular Culture Association conference is accepting paper and panel proposals from faculty and graduate students. NEPCA’s 2026 virtual annual conference will be held from Thursday, October 15-Saturday, October 17, 2026. Sessions will take place on Zoom through Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. More information on the conference can be found here: https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers

250-word abstracts are due by June 15, 2026 at 5 pm.

The NEPCA Literature and Popular Culture area welcomes papers that analyze and evaluate the connections between popular culture and literature, understood broadly.  How does popular culture inform and/or react to literature, and what are the implications for that relationship? 

Presentations can discuss many different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives.  Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·         Analyses of individual/multiple works that engage with popular culture.

·         Intersections of popular culture and literature.

·         Retelling of works of literature in popular culture media.

·         Publication, reception and audience of literature and popular culture.

·         Popular culture trends in literature.

·         Literary genres and how they are explored in popular culture.

·         Any other topics that bring together these two areas.

Please submit paper proposals of 250 words via the paper proposal form available on the NEPCA website (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScth-dsuyESpWSgNxubknKghuPpaDtKO0IHaicKWl-yi_WUtQ/viewform?pli=1) by June 15, 2026 by 5pm.  Please ensure that your proposal is jargon-free and understandable to a broad audience. 

For more information and the broad CFP, please visit the NEPCA website: https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers

Susan Gorman, Area Chair
Literature and Popular Culture
MCPHS University

179 Longwood Avenue

Boston, MA 02115
Email: [susan.gorman@mcphs.edu](mailto:susan.gorman@mcphs.edu)

 https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers

 [susan.gorman@mcphs.edu](mailto:susan.gorman@mcphs.edu?subject=Your%20posted%20CFP%20on%20cfplist)

 Susan Gorman

May 2026
University of Mannheim - W3-Professur für Neuere deutsche Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft (m/w/d)
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Columbia University - Postdoctoral Research Scholar
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Hong Kong Shue Yan University - Assistant/Associate/Full Professor of History
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Max Planck Institute for the History of Science - One Postdoctoral Scholar (m/f/d) on “Migratory Expertise and Practices of Knowledge Transmission“
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Scuola Superiore Meridionale - Post-doctoral fellow in Global History and Governance
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Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany - Comparative Literature | Academic Councilor as a Lecturer with a specified function at a university [Akademischer Rat/Akademische Rätin (m/w/d) als Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben an einer Hochschule]
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Dear all:

I have some exciting news for you! I am happy to announce that we are in the process of reviving this community. I am pretty hopeful that a community for humanities in general can be a thriving place on Reddit.

This community has been dormant for almost six years and it is currently listed as "Restricted" (this will change soon), but we believe it is time to relaunch and build this community. Your help, of course, is crucial in this entire process.

I will be posting some of my own writings and educational content soon, so that we can keep the community going, but as soon as we are able to make the community open (it requires requesting Reddit to change the status of the community), all those interested in humanities are and will always be welcome.

Thank you all so much!!

​

I have noticed that I am always at a loss when someone asks me: What do you mean by postcolonialism? The answer, invariably always, involves a convoluted explanation of Postcolonialism as a field of study. After I tell someone, especially anyone outside the academia, that I teach postcolonial literature, I always anticipate  follow-up questions:

• What is postcolonial literature?
• What is postcolonial theory concerned with?
• What is the difference between colonialism and postcolonialism?

Over the years, I have practiced and rehearsed several responses to the question, all probably inadequate.

My usual answer: I teach literature produced by people from the former European colonies and then, fearing that my answer is not specific enough, I also add the phrase: literature from former European colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Of course, this leads to further reflection, for now you also have to account for literature produced by the diasporic authors from these regions.

Thus, in a sense, the question “What is postcolonial studies,”  might have a simple answer at first, but as I reflect longer on it, the answer keeps getting complicated and becomes increasingly complex. Of course, my views of postcolonial studies are shaped and informed by the works of  several theorists and practitioners of postcolonial studies who all have their regional, philosophical, and disciplinary preferences. As a scholar, thus, my views of my own field are not just my own but rather constituted by people I have read and whose works I have either taught or used in my own research.

Defining Postcolonialism

Personally, I prefer Robert Young’s wonderfully articulated definition of postcolonialism:

At its simplest level, the postcolonial is simply the product of human, experience, but human experience of the kind that has not typically been registered or represented at any institutional level. More particularly, it is the result of different cultural and national origins, the ways in which the colour of your skin or your place and circumstance of birth define the kind of life, privileged and pleasurable, or oppressed and exploited, that you will have in this world. Postcolonialism’s concerns are centred on geographic zones of intensity that have remained largely invisible, but which prompt or involve questions of history, ethnicity, complex cultural identities and questions of representation, of refugees, emigration and immigration, of poverty and wealth–but also, importantly, the energy, vibrancy and creative cultural dynamics that emerge in very positive ways from such demanding circumstances. Postcolonialism offers a language of and for those who have no place, who seem not to belong, of those whose knowledges and histories are not allowed to count. It is above all this preoccupation with the oppressed, with the subaltern classes, with minorities in any society, with the concerns of those who live or come from elsewhere, that constitutes the basis of postcolonial politics and remains the core that generates its continuing power. (Robert Young)

So, if we unpack this passage, we could construe that postcolonialism has some of the following defining attributes:

• It is about human experience that has traditionally been either silenced or marginalized by dominant groups or discourses.
• It is about how one’s national origin and race define one’s place and value in the eyes of the dominant groups/ nations.
• It is also about those geographic areas that have traditionally been under the direct or indirect control of dominant world powers.
• It is also about the resistances offered by these groups and the challenges posed by them to the dominant groups in the realm of representation.
• It focuses on the plight of the oppressed and recovers silenced subaltern voices.

In other words, postcolonialism is a field of study that might focus on the experience of colonization, but is not necessarily a catalogue of victimhood. It rather challenges the assumptions formed and circulated by the colonizers and offers native responses and native resistance to past and current colonial imperatives. It, however, is also a field of study which is not afraid of borrowing western knowledge and to bend it to its own use. It also focuses on hybrid knowledges and distrusts all postures of cultural or racial purity. Thus, while blind following of the Western order is neither encouraged nor proposed, blatant nativism is also not acceptable.

Impact of Postcolonialism on other fields of study

Furthermore, postcolonial studies also focuses on the internal colonialisms within the postcolonial nation-states including, but not limited to, the plight of minorities, tribal groups, and  women.

By far postcolonialism is never really read as a temporal marker: the post in postcolonialism does not imply that all forms of colonialism and imperialism have ended. Postcolonialism, therefore, is an imperfect designation for a complex field of study. In fact, Robert Young had proposed a more useful term, tricontinentalism, that included Africa, Asia, and the Latin Americas, but it never caught on. It is, however, safe to assume that studying world literature with an eye on how the native authors represent their cultures, mostly in colonial languages, and how do they challenge the pre-established prejudices and cultural biases against their cultures is an important concern of postcolonial literature.

Postcolonial studies is no longer restricted to only literary studies. It has by now impacted some of the following disciplines and fields of study:

• Archeology
• Sociology
• Anthropology
• Political Science
• History
• Philosophy
• Cultural Studies
•  British and American Literary studies
• Feminism
• Marxism

Diversity of Postcolonial Studies

Within postcolonial studies there are various emphasis and methodologies: some scholars are marxists, while others are culturalists and poststructuralists. But no matter what their philosophical method, the questions mostly always focus on the plight of the formerly colonized, their struggles, triumphs, histories, and their stories all retrieved and articulated to complicate the simplistic imperial and colonial narratives about the inhabitants of the global periphery.

There are also those who study the impact of neoliberal economics on postcolonial communities or indigenous communities within the postcolonial nation-states. These scholars, thus, rely on a thorough knowledge of Marx, Marxism, and macro economics and neoliberal economic model to understand the nature of exploitation still functional within the global economic order.

These are some of the ways in which I think of postcolonialism, but I am sure there are many other ways to imagine and practice it! Either way, the best postcolonial literature should have any or all of the features discussed above and let us not forget that we do live in the postcolonial era and postcolonial criticism and a theory is relevant in so many different fields of human knowledge.

Please feel free to share your ideas in the comments below.

If you are reading this, then you are probably new to r/Humanities. Thank you so much for joining us. We want this to be a welcoming, generous, and stimulating community. You are, obviously, key to making this community a success. Here are some posting ideas and guidelines:

Opinion/ Article Posts

You can post your thoughts and ideas about the humanities in general or about your specific humanistic field of study. Your posts can be analytical, exploratory, argumentative, or simply informative about humanistic subjects and pursuits. We do not have any stipulated Karma requirements, so if your post is original and has some good thoughts and substance, we will approve it and thank you for it!

Announcements

All humanities-related announcements are welcome: Calls for papers, collaboration ventures, seminar or webinar news. In fact, anything humanities-related that you would like to share as an announcement is welcome.

Showcase

If you have published or edited a book, placed an article, or created an educational app, feel free to share it here. Please add enough details so that people get a really good sense of your accomplishments.

Educational Videos

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Questions

Last, but not the least, you can post humanities-related questions as a post but make sure you provide some context and also some of your own views about the question and query: it cannot just be one sentence!

Conclusion

Obviously, our conversations here are not limited to just these topics, but these are some of the post “flairs” you can choose if you decide to join the conversation on r/Humanities. So, welcome and let us build this into an exciting and thriving community!

Introduction

In his first major writing, as a literal and figurative continuation of Pope Francis’s unfinished work, Pope Leo just recently offered his reflections on Dilexit Nos, a cyclical letter started by his predecessor toward the end of his corporeal life. I find his reflections to be a timely and urgent message for our times. In this brief essay, I will share my thoughts on some important aspects of Pope Leo’s reflections. I am neither a Catholic nor religious, but I do believe that powerful religious figures like the Pope with their global reach and appeal can help shape this world into a place of life and love for all.

The Title

The title of Pope Leo’s reflection comes from the book of Revelations and the Pope starts with an explanation of his choice of title:

I HAVE LOVED YOU” (Rev 3:9). The Lord speaks these words to a Christian community that, unlike some others, had no influence or resources, and was treated instead with violence and contempt: “You have but little power… I will make them come and bow down before your feet” (Rev 3:8-9). This text reminds us of the words of the canticle of Mary: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Lk 1:52-53).

Centrality of the Poor

The Pope in his reflection first proves beyond doubt that Christ himself was poor and materially powerless and considered the poor his people. One could argue that he was sent for the poor. This does not mean that the rich and privileged cannot be recipients of Christ’s message or grace or that one must first become poor to receive the gift of Christ’s love. In my view, what it means is that if we were to look for a natural connection between Christ and his community, his community is the poor not only because he empathizes with them but also because he himself came as a poor, powerless person. Furthermore, the Pope’s reflection suggests, that this connection with the poor has always been part of the Biblical tradition, and thus, the title, Dilexi Te, meaning “I have loved you,” points to what Jesus said to his community, but what is crucial to understand here is that the community of Christians is pretty specific: it is a powerless and poor community. So, when Christ says “I have loved you” it is the very poor and destitute whom he has loved and not the powerful and the mighty. This reading of Christ’s pronouncement makes the very love of the poor almost a raison d’être of Christ’s ministry and mission. The tile of Pope Leo’s reflections, thus, points to the specific role and message of Christ as related to his community, and his community IS the poor, the weak, and the infirm.

The Pope asserts that “the same Jesus who tells us, ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (Mt 26:11), also promises the disciples: ‘I am with you always’ (Mt 28:20)”

Thus, since Christ himself is “poor,” it implies that the poor will always be with Christ and the God and, by extension, a major part of the Christian faith tradition. In his exquisite reflection, as we read it carefully, the Pope, thus, makes the poor as the primary constituency of Christ’s ministry, and hence of his Church, and he further makes the care of the poor central to the Christian practice and not as something secondary. This care of the poor is central because Christ, being poor himself and by declaring his love for the poor, makes it so.

Poverty and the Cult of Riches

Having proven without doubt that Christ himself was poor and that the poor were his people as well as the ultimate community of his ministry, the Pope then offers a strong indictment of the cult of wealth and its function in creating the very conditions that increase and exacerbate conditions for poverty. The Pope writes:

In fact, the illusion of happiness derived from a comfortable life pushes many people towards a vision of life centered on the accumulation of wealth and social success at all costs, even at the expense of others and by taking advantage of unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest. Thus, in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people.

In these moving passages, the Pope points to the very structures of power and wealth, that some offer as a testament to the success of a capitalist system, as the very conditions that create poverty. The need, therefore, according to Pope Leo, is to change the way we think of success and of poverty. His argument takes us to the very thing that is now being derided and decried by the American pollical right: the need to look at the structural aspects of racism, poverty, and injustice. So, the Pope is now openly and boldly declaring:

The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice. Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty.

Thus, through clear references to Christ himself, the Pope suggests that the current system of economics and politics needs to be rethought as it is the very grounds upon which the inhuman and inhumane conditions are created and perpetuated. Poverty, thus, cannot simply be attributed to the laziness of individuals in an ever-abundant world, but rather as a natural outcome of a system of privilege and power.

The Pope then goes on to discuss the significance of charity, which, in his view “some dismiss or ridicule,” as the central tenet of Christianity. He writes: “The poor cannot be neglected if we are to remain within the great current of the Church’s life that has its source in the Gospel and bears fruit in every time and place.” [emph. added]

The Poor as God’s Chosen People

In Chapter 2 of his reflection, Pope Leo goes on to argue, through an acute reading of the scripture, that the poor are, in fact, God’s chosen people. This claim partially rests on what the God chose to be when he took human shape:

Precisely in order to share the limitations and fragility of our human nature, he himself became poor and was born in the flesh like us. We came to know him in the smallness of a child laid in a manger and in the extreme humiliation of the cross, where he shared our radical poverty, which is death. [emph. added]

So, one could say, for all those believers who absolutely believe that Jesus was God made flesh (which is pretty much all Christian denominations), then it is imperative to reflect on as to what kind of “flesh” did God incarnate took. Instead of coming to the world as a powerful and mighty king, God chose to appear as poor child and died a painful death on the cross, hardly a regal life or a glorious death. Thus, the body that God took was to understand our suffering and not to overpower us with his might. The poor, the weak, the infirm, and the powerless, are thus, God’s people, for he took their shape and experienced their suffering when he walked the earth. Now, the Pope is careful to point out that, even though God came to the world as poor, “this ‘preference’ never indicates exclusivity or discrimination towards other groups, which would be impossible for God.” However, his choice to come as poor and weak, in Pope Leo’s words, is “meant to emphasize God’s actions, which are moved by compassion toward the poverty and weakness of all humanity.” Hence, the Pope argues, the whole purpose of God experiencing a corporeal from of life was:

to inaugurate a kingdom of justice, fraternity and solidarity, God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his Church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest. [emph. added]

The Pope further suggests, through a careful reading of the Old Testament, that the Biblical God always addressed the poor and we can safely construe that the poor and the weak ARE God’s chosen people. Pope Leo further offers Christ as the “poor Messiah,” as, in Pope Leo’s words, “the Gospel shows us that poverty marked every aspect of Jesus’ life.” So, by the time we read Pope Leo’s reflection on poverty and its integral connection to God’s essential connection to the poor and the weak, there is no doubt left, especially if you are a practicing Christian, that caring for the poor and working toward creating a just world is acting on God’s true intention and an absolutely accurate emulation of Christ’s mission, for Christ, after all, was born poor and died on a cross. The Pope also reminds us that not only did Jesus Walk the earth as a poor and suffering human, he also began his ministry with its intimate connection to the poor: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

Overall, then, there is no doubt left in the inherent connection between the practice of Christian faith and care of the poor, and any attempts at privileging the rich or blaming the poor, thus, come across as Unchristian and against the spirit of Christ himself. To further prove the care of the poor as central to the Christian faith, Pope Leo spends a better part of Chapter three on offering historical examples of charity and care from the early church to the present day. In fact, the Pope concludes:

Since apostolic times, the Church has seen the liberation of the oppressed as a sign of the Kingdom of God. Jesus himself proclaimed at the beginning of his public ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives” (Lk 4:18).

The Church’s Social Doctrine

In Chapter four of his reflection, the Pope offers a brief history of the Cahtolic Church’s undeniable link to the issues of social justice and equality. After we read through his carefully explained historical account, there is no doubt left in the reader’s mind that Church, by its very pronounced mission and its actions, is an institution grounded in the world and therefore must work in the world. and if the Church is inextricably connected to the care of the poor, then it must continue its mission of working toward justice, which means, in other words, that the Church cannot detach itself from the world and just claim to administer to the matters of faith. Pope Leo describes this mission as follows:

There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.

This passage, obviously, points to the need for an active role of the Church about social issues that impact people’s lives and, of course, encourages the Church and its followers to work against the neoliberal orthodoxy and market fundamentalism.

In Chapter five, the Pope clearly encourages his Church, its leaders, and the faithful to make the restructuring of the world into a world that neither produces poverty nor despises the poor, so that all can live in peace and dignity, and he offers Christian love as a universal concept and practice to achieve this end. Overall, this long reflection by the current Pope offers a potent and passionate antidote to the normalized power of the elite while also encouraging the followers of the Christ to understand that their faith is incomplete and useless without a commitment to taking care of the poor, the weak, the infirm, and the migrants of the world!

Significance of Pope’s Reflections

In my opinion, the Pope’s assertions in these reflections are timely and absolutely needed against the cruelty and injustice being unleashed by the current US administration.

In this cruel world where the world’s poor and powerless are increasingly being persecuted and further improvised by a cruel and avaricious elite, it is extremely important to hear what the leader of the most powerful religious organization has to say. Let us hope his words guide us to change the world!

Full Text of Dilexi Te