Humanities, this may be your Sputnik moment. Sputnik was a wakeup call to American educators to improve their teaching in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But technological expertise is not enough. In meeting the challenges of society today we will want to draw on the resources of philosophy, politics, and economics, as well as historical and religious studies.
Recently the New Yorker magazine online ran an article on the importance of the press for democracy, drawing upon a mid-century study by a group that included Reinhold Niebuhr. Follow that line and you get to his prescient essay, "The Race Problem", first published in the summer of 1942 in Christianity and Society. That it was prescient is not the point. That it was dedicated to a thorough and serious examination of the persistent challenges of human society is: these are more than pandemic issues.
And even more recently, in an article by Lawrence Wright, entitled, in the July 20, 2020, issue of the New Yorker, Gianna Pomata, a medical historian from Johns Hopkins, observed, "After the Black Death, nothing was the same. What I expect now is something as dramatic is going to happen, not so much in medicine but in economy and culture. Because of danger, there's this wonderful human response, which is to think in a new way."
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