“That comedy is a mansion built on tragic foundations was a theory given credence by Sigmund Freud. “A jest betrays something serious,” he wrote in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious... The first doubled comedians were the first professional comedians, the comic actors who plied their trade as professional theaters emerged during the late sixteenth century. It was these men for whom the word comedian was coined, a designation that sought to describe the nature of their labor by placing them within a strict generic context. Prior to this moment, it was not possible to define comedy so neatly, nor could it be so closely associated with particular individuals. Rather, it existed as part of the much wider category of “fooling,” a diverse and multi-faceted portmanteau of spectacles that might include jugglers, acrobats, and simpletons as much as it did jesters and wits. Medieval fooling could also incorporate a mystical dimension, imagining the fool as both scapegoat and scourge, a quasi-apocalyptic Everyman who stood to remind us of the principle listed by St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians: ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.’”

Andrew McConnell Stott, "Split Personalities," Lapham's Quarterly - http://bit.ly/1cFqbTq

“We have tended to see the professor as a single figure, but he is now a multiple being, of many types, tasks, and positions... As higher ed has undergone some of the same changes as medicine, a complicated web of academic labor has developed. For the student, the result is similar to the patient seeking health care: When she enters college, she only occasionally encounters a full-fledged professor; she is more likely to see beta professionals—the adjunct comp teacher, the math TA, the graduate assistant in the writing center, the honors-program adviser, and the staff members who run the programs... The chief difference from medicine is the steep drop in pay, benefits, and job security for those who hold beta positions... What good is knowledge if it brings us gross inequality and unfair terms for a majority of those who work, or with whom we work?”

Jeffrey J. Williams, "The Great Stratification," The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/1d6FgKj

“The high cost of college makes people think that most faculty are overpaid. Let me debunk this myth...My total gross: $621,652. That’s it—25 years in universities, including nine part-time jobs. Annual average gross income: $24,866. McDonald’s suggests that employees find a second job. Since I did not take that into account, we should not count my income from jobs that were outside of universities. If so, my academic earnings were $609,413. Compare that with $581,450 at McDonald’s. Predictably, I earned more as a professor than I might have made as an employee at McDonald’s. What is really surprising is that it took me 25 years to do so.
”

Alberto A. Martinez, "Who Earns More: Professor vs. Frycook," - http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/?p=6283

Politifact recently checked a claim that the founders of the American republic thought religion only referred to Christianity. They deemed this a pants on fire lie based on the following:

“Thomas Kidd, professor of history at Baylor University and the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, said ‘the founders were certainly aware of other religions besides Christianity, and discussed them at length in their writings.’

Kidd pointed us to a 1818 letter from John Adams: ‘This country has done much. I wish it would do more; and annul every narrow idea in religion, government and commerce,’ Adams wrote. ‘It has pleased the providence of the first cause, the universal cause, that Abraham should give religion not only to Hebrews, but to Christians and Mohomitans, the greatest part of the modern civilized world.’

Benjamin Franklin also weighed in on the subject. Jan Ellen Lewis, professor of history at Rutgers University, cited Franklin’s autobiography, when he praised a new meeting house built in Philadephia. ‘The design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general,’ Franklin wrote. ‘So that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.’

In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson spoke directly to the debate over the crafting of a Virginia statute for religious freedom. Jefferson describes a proposal to add the phrase ‘the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion. The insertion was rejected by a great majority,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘In proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.’”

"Fundamentalist: When Founders Said Religion They Meant Christianity," Politifact - http://bit.ly/1leHdc5

I find it odd that Christian people today seek constitutional rights to oppress other religious groups. It is equally absurd that radical secularists seek to exclude religious groups from all public reason. The form of secularism the founders seem to have had in mind in the above quotations generally promotes the State's even handed-ness towards different groups rather than their total exclusion. The aim seems to be the best way to promote freedom as broadly as possible. That it has turned out to be rather difficult to figure out the best way to foster a reasonably fair expression of religious difference in a practicable manner over the past few hundred years, is beside the point. As it happens, the founders did not say that the task of balancing freedom with equality and fraternity would be easy. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age provides a lengthy recent contextualization of these matters. 

“The best inspiration often came while walking. Beethoven always took a pencil and paper with him in the Vienna Woods, and Kierkegaard often came home and started scribbling again still in his hat and coat. Some always wrote standing up - Hemingway and, I think, Virginia Woolf (who is not covered here). Nabokov started standing up, then progressed to sitting and finally lying down. Few seem to have practised any more violent exercise than walking, apart from Byron with his boxing and riding and, rather surprisingly, Joan Miró. The dreamy surrealist was an ardent practitioner of boxing, running and ‘Mediterranean yoga’. He detested going to parties, telling an American journalist, ‘They get on my tits.’”

Christopher Hart, "Rise and Shine" - www.literaryreview.co.uk/hart_12_13.php

“A small but thriving subculture is documenting Google Books’ scanning process, in the form of Tumblrs, printed books, photographs, online videos, and gallery-based installations. Something new is happening here that brings together widespread nostalgia for paperbound books with our concerns about mass digitization. Scavengers obsessively comb through page after page of Google Books, hoping to stumble upon some glitch that hasn’t yet been unearthed...

Soulellis calls the Library of the Printed Web ‘an accumulation of accumulations,’ much of it printed on demand. In fact, he says that ‘I could sell the Library of the Printed Web and then order it again and have it delivered to me in a matter of days.’ A few years ago, such books would never have been possible. The book is far from dead: it’s returning in forms that few could ever have imagined.”

"The Artful Accidents of Google Books," The New Yorker - http://nyr.kr/1csSx32

“But why is a scrolling blur of disembodied letters closer to the supposed essence of literature than a spoken performance or time spent in the presence of charismatic objects? Manuscripts communicate in ways electronic texts, and even printed books, can’t. They speak to presence — to the presence of a person, to the physicality of their body and the instant of their creation. What’s more, the meaning we derive from any text is inextricable from the web of perceptions and impressions that structures our reception of it: the heft of the paper, the smell of the binding, the shape of the handwriting. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze called this tactile intermediary the logique du sens. Pace Parks, there is no ‘essence of literary experience’ that precedes its embodiment.”

Jacob Mikanowski, "Papyralysis," LA Review of Books - http://bit.ly/17R4iAT

“The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades (and which, still partly redacted, I accessed thanks to the open-sesame of the Freedom of Information Act) is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.”

"The FBI Files on Being and Nothingness," http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=1099013653123741779

“Martin Heidegger, who was both Arendt’s teacher and lover during her student days at the University of Marburg in the mid-1920s, once remarked that there was nothing interesting to say about the life of a philosopher, only about the work. But von Trotta shows how foolish a claim that was. Her film has rightly been praised for portraying thinking on-screen in a manner that isn’t boring in the slightest. To be sure, von Trotta has her tricks: Arendt was a prodigious smoker, and her addiction is used throughout the film as something of a visual gimmick—wisps of cigarette smoke as eye candy, as it were. But first and foremost, von Trotta has Barbara Sukowa playing Arendt, and she is one of the great actresses of our time.”

"Hannah and Her Admirers," The Nation - http://bit.ly/18YZZhN

“Gritsch... writes to challenge the interpretations put forward by other modern Luther scholars that luther’s opinions towards the Jews can be described as anti-Judiastic, but not anti-Semitic. For Gritisch, the salient difference between these distinctions is that while anti-Judaistic sentiments are rational disagree- ments with Jewish religious beliefs, anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews that is inherently irrational or fanciful. Gritsch argues that luther’s animus was of this latter kind and was ‘against his better judgment’ in the sense that it was internally inconsistent with his broader theological convictions. Gritsch concludes that in his teachings on the Jews, Luther violated his principle that one should only ever be a ‘theologian of the cross.’”

Andrew Kloes, "Book Review: Luther's Hostility to the Jews in His Own Theological Category, Eric Gritsch, Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism: Against His Own Better Judgment, Grand Rapids: WB Eerdmans, 2012," Expository Times, 125(3) 2013.