None of us, no matter where we live or who we are, can innocently assume that we live on a different planet from the nightmare world of the gunman and his white nationalist story. But ours is a whole earth. We worry that a construction of the humanities that does not teach students to look to cultural differences in terms of their complex, reality-based relations, weakens the prospects of a peace that would include all of us. In this sense it makes our job as religionists and humanists that much harder.
With my colleagues Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Steven M. Wasserstrom, I wrote a response to the Christchurch massacre, reflecting on white supremacy and the challenges humanities departments face in light of its rising tide.
Read it here.