Tag: nyu

Intense Friendliness: Kids, Cults and Criteria

Posted on by

by Ashley Baxstrom

NYU Local reported last week that city students have a lot more to worry about than midterms and the rising price of lattes: dangerous CULTS want to steal your soul, body and money!

According to the post–less an article than a humorous piece, the author admitted to me–the Campus Safety website “warns that cult members may ‘[share] with you the answers they have found to life’s questions, they may seek to enlist your time, energy, and resources in endeavors they believe to be worthwhile.’” This comes from a section entitled “Tips for Identifying a Cult” (right under a section on “How to Avoid Common Swindles and Con Games”). Other tips include: to beware approaching strangers in Greenwich Village (um, how else am I supposed to get a date?) and to call the Center for Spiritual Life for assistance.
Continue Reading →

Taking Tocqueville and Darwin for a Ride

Posted on by

By Nathan Schradle

If something like a “Global Civil Society” ever becomes a reality (I’m picturing a giant face made of thousands of tiny robots, like in the Matrix Revolutions… only hopefully slightly less hell-bent on the destruction of the human species), it may want to give a huge shout-out to the year 1831. For starters, it’s the year that our very own New York University was founded, a university that recently played host to the dialogues that bear its name. Furthermore, as those who attended the third of the “NYU Dialogues on the Global Civil Society” can attest, the most recent speaker asserted that the stakes of such a conversation were first made plain in the very same year.

On October 31st, 2011, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks delivered his lecture, “The Great Partnership: Religion and the Moral Sense?” to a remarkably enthusiastic audience (when a group of about 15 students is lined up outside before the doors even open, “enthusiastic” might be an understatement). In an attempt to describe the role he sees religion playing in any “global civil society,” Lord Sacks pointed to two journeys that began in the year in question, specifically Charles Darwin’s voyage aboard the HMS Beagle and Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to America. Sacks drew some eloquent parallels between the two trips, in which he established a set of binaries that constituted the crux of his argument: competition and cooperation, aggression and altruism, markets/politics and religion. Continue Reading →