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Fidgety and a little bored in the crammed pews of the Church of St. Francis Xavier, my eight-year-old son waited with us for the service to begin. For distraction and readiness, he etched on his program, with his parents’ help: “Today we reflect on the life of Daniel Berrigan. He was a great priest, prophet, poet and peacemaker. He touched many lives with his actions and words. It is nice to be in such a beautiful church with so many people honoring a man they loved.” Simple and true, these words presaged a ceremony that edified and even transformed the two thousand or so people blessed to have been there. The death on April 30 of the 94-year-old Fr. Dan Berrigan, S.J. at a Jesuit infirmary in New York City has been big news. Heartfelt obituaries have poured forth: from fellow priest and political troublemaker John Dear; from the rogue Washington Post columnist Coleman McCarthy, …

Something of Shia LaBeouf’s name stands in, perfectly, controversially, for what is now happening to us, across us, as a kind of general FKA-transing of all available terms. Around the time Caitlyn Jenner came out, there was talk of an intersectional “trans-”: a trans for race and class and even for ecographic sub-constituencies. During Occupy Wall Street, the same talk happened, and then nothing happened, and a few people said it was still on, and then nothing happened.

Intersectionality seems to be the least sustainable piece …

Walter Benjamin’s strategy in the Theses on the Philosophy of History was to focus on a non-human moment in human time and to present this instance on blast in his prose style. What I mean by “blast” here is the fact that the message had to be pirated past ideological hangers-on and historical barriers, past both Marxist and theotropic renditions, and also past the Nazi episode that might have been his more obvious target in 1940. His prose is clear but depth-charged, resonates at another frequency, still as if exploded past the imaginary proscriptions of Theodor Adorno, who was already in situ in New York …

New York is the empire of the present, for in this city the past is gone and the future is already here. For me, coming to America was a form of time travel. Not into the future or into the past, but rather from them and into the deep dense present. I come from Jerusalem, the holy and sad city that is at the heart of this complex space people here call the Middle East. In Jerusalem, the present is narrow, pale …

Philosophy is suffering gender-wise (and here I bracket for the moment class, race, and sexuality) — see Sally Haslanger’s “Women in Philosophy? Do the Math” in The Stone. But the gender trouble is not simply a matter of representation in the field. The problem also entails a regretfully enduring elision in the transmission of Western thought, a continued forgetfulness of invaluable labor …

In 1941, during World War II, German émigré sociologist Hans Speier wrote an essay in Social Research titled, “Magic Geography.” In this essay, he argues, “Maps are not confined to the representation of a given state of affairs. They can be drawn to symbolize changes, or as blueprints of the future. They may make certain traits …

As Lindsey Freeman reminds us in Longing for the Bomb, Margaret Mead once worried in the 1960s about the still-youthful Oak Ridge, Tennessee (“The Atomic City”), becoming a “city without grandmothers” (p. 175), or a place where there are no guardians of the memory of Oak Ridge culture. Fittingly enough, though, Freeman’s grandmother becomes an important punctuation point in the book, …