In a recent essay in the Boston Globe, Yale law professor Anthony Kronman decries the fact that “our top universities have embraced a research-driven ideal that has squeezed the question of life’s meaning from the college curriculum, limiting the range of questions teachers feel they have the right and authority to teach.” This abandonment of asking, and attempting to answer, the “big” questions – why are we here, what living is for, what should we care about and why – has left the rising generations “directionless and vulnerable to being hijacked for political ends.” He exhorts his fellow educators to take up once again the calling to be “shapers of souls,” to address the big questions of life “in all their sprawling grandeur, without reticence or embarrassment,” and offers as an example his own Directed Studies class at Yale, which begins with readings in Herodotus, Homer, and Plato and concludes with Wittgenstein, Eliot, and Arendt.

Kronman’s recommendation comes with an interesting twist: He proposes that we address the big questions independently of religion, providing a meaning-and-morality-seeking alternative to our spiritually impoverished culture: “spiritually serious but nondogmatic, concerned with the soul but agnostic about God.” Click to continue »